Kenzo Takada

Before the Japanese avant-garde arrived in Paris in the 1980s, there was Kenzo, and I think he's too often left out of that story. He was the first Japanese designer to make a real name in Paris, and he did it with clothes that were cheerful, easy, and full of colour - pretty much the opposite of the black, severe style that would follow him.

Kenzo Takada was born in 1939 in Himeji and was one of the first male students at Tokyo's Bunka Fashion College, a women's school at the time. In late 1964 he set out for Paris by ship, arriving at the start of 1965 and planning to stay a few months. He stayed for the rest of his life. He sold sketches to fashion houses and worked for a pattern and textile company, and in 1970 he opened his own small boutique in the Galerie Vivienne, a covered arcade near the Palais-Royal. He had very little money, so he and friends painted the walls themselves with a jungle scene inspired by Henri Rousseau, and made his first collection largely from inexpensive cotton bought at markets. The shop was called Jungle Jap, a name he later dropped. Within months, one of his dresses was on the cover of Elle.

His clothes were a big part of the looser, more relaxed feeling of 1970s ready-to-wear. He used big, simple shapes influenced by the kimono - wide sleeves, straight cuts, no tight fitting - and layered them together: smocks over trousers, tunics over skirts, knitwear over prints. He mixed florals, checks, and stripes in one outfit on purpose, and borrowed freely from folk costume from all over the world, from Romanian peasant blouses to Scandinavian knits and Chinese jackets, which placed him firmly within the decade's ethnic and global influences. That easy, layered way of dressing sits well with the bohemian silhouette and with mix-and-match separates.

He was also a showman: his catwalk presentations, full of music and dancing models, were more like parties than traditional shows, which helped make Paris ready-to-wear feel fun. For me, Kenzo's great contribution is joy. In a decade that often took itself seriously, he made clothes that looked happy, and he showed that a young outsider with a painted shop and a pile of market cotton could take on Paris and win.