Kozaburo Akasaka has an incredible gift for storytelling. The amount of care and craft that goes into his work is staggering; one can sense the emotion in each hand stitch. This unique sensitivity has drawn much attention since he graduated from Central Saint Martins and then Parsons in 2016. Dover Street Market snapped up his graduate collection, he made the LVMH Prize shortlist with Fall 2017, and then earned the competition’s Special Prize with Spring 2018. All this was done by a single man, who produced all of his initial pieces by hand—and the hand comes through clearly.
Akasaka works out of a brownstone in Bushwick. On the morning of our appointment, he is standing coolly on the front steps, the best advertisement for his own designs: curved leather flares over block-heeled boots, a black velvet top, and copper ball chain that has gone pale green from rust. Inside, he steeps a pot of green tea and explains his decision not to hold a presentation this season, focusing instead on New York and Paris buyer appointments and slowly building his team. “It’s still a small structure, I’m doing everything by myself, so I don’t want to make it too crazy,” he said, offering a matcha tea biscuit shaped like a leaf.
The idea of “individual globalism” informs Akasaka’s work and his heartfelt desire to exchange and blend cultures. This season began for him on a one-week road trip to El Paso, Texas, where a friend sent him in search of the best cowboy boots. “I always liked them,” he said. “I think there is a certain unique authenticity in U.S. cowboy boots, jeans, [and] Western shirts that I want to keep examining.” He then went on to New Mexico and was further inspired by the unexpected meeting of his childhood and adopted homes. “It was very dry desert, very beautiful, but at the same time, the first atomic bomb was created there, so there’s a little bit of chemical cling,” he said. Though it began as a vacation, it turned into his creative ode to the American West as seen through his eyes.
It is a timely visual reference thanks to Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, but Akasaka made it entirely his own by infusing his Japanese sensibility. The collection is called Ghost Ranch, after Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico retreat. “But I wanted to get that it’s not totally classic American Western, but combining the Japanese, Asian motifs to create somewhere that’s nowhere,” he said. “Almost an outer space feeling.” There was a moleskin jacket with the knotted button closures of a changshan, and sturdy denim jackets actually made from sashiko, the fabric traditionally used to make judo gis. A silver belt buckle, on closer examination, features the gaping maw of an oni, or demon, and a beautiful black blanket draped over the shoulder was a collaboration with indigenous weavers in Chimayo, whose workshop Akasaka visited on his travels.
Beyond beautiful clothes, Akasaka is uniquely committed to sustainability. In Hokkaido, the northern region of Japan, overpopulation of deer has lead locals to hunt. Akasaka repurposed those skins as statement vests and trim jackets. His signature recycled jeans are made from the scraps of denim discarded by vintage stores when they slice the legs to create cut-off shorts; he shreds them down into new fibers, then hand weaves them into an entirely new fabric that looks like a remarkable nubby denim tweed. “I wanted to show sustainability in my own individual way,” he said, and the difference is striking.
One could go on and on explaining the thoughtful references and exquisite techniques in Akasaka’s collection, but this editor will finish with this: his nod to the Navajo concho belt, reimagined with silver buckles of Japanese calligraphic script. The characters were chosen and drawn by a childhood friend who had become a Buddhist monk at a temple in Kyoto. “It says ‘tou-u hou-u,’ which means ‘rain falls on everything,’ happiness or sadness will fall on everybody—nobody is only happy or only sad,” he said. It served as a reminder that fashion has the power to move so much more.
