The most powerful fashion designer you don’t know about

Like many other female fashion designers, Chitose Abe, the spunky force behind the Japanese men’s and women’s brand Sacai, wears her own creations and has eccentric habits when it comes to caring for them. For instance, she washes her graphic T-shirts, which often celebrate the collaborations with other brands, businesses and pop culture icons that she releases at a haywire pace, by hand. They are 100 percent cotton and certainly machine washable. But hand-washing is the only way she can ensure a particular loose, kind of boyish fit, which is what feels inherently right to balance the femininity of arms and hands adorned with jewelry – a men’s Rolex watch, and a ring she designed with Cartier with gold, silver and rose gold bands that loop around multiple fingers – and bell-bottoms and high heels.

Explaining this during an interview in early September in New York, where she was celebrating a collection that paid homage to late street style photographer Bill Cunningham at Bergdorf Goodman and another with skater Mark Gonzales at Dover Street Market, she cackled at the absurdity. “It’s not just a T-shirt,” she said, speaking through an interpreter. “It’s something that’s very important. Something very precious, even when it’s very casual.”

Abe, who started Sacai in 1999 and is based in Tokyo, has spent the past 25 years (a laudable eon in fashion) fusing conflicting ideas into single garments: precious but casual, feminine but masculine, jacket and dress. This idea has made her one of the most powerful women in fashion for her ability to speak to the hypebeasts who love her Nike collections and the stylish cognoscenti who collect her clothing from Bergdorf Goodman or specialty boutiques like Washington, D.C.’s Relish.

Abe may be her own greatest work of synthesis: Unusually in the fashion business, she is both CEO and creative lead of Sacai, a dual role that is essential to her. (She also owns her label outright.) “More than 90 percent of her life is dedicated to the creation of Sacai,” said her interpreter, who relayed the designer’s words throughout our conversation in the third person. “She feels that the business side team is growing, and she can rely more on her team. But she feels on the creative side, she simply loves what she does. She really loves making clothes and designing clothes.”

Japan has produced most of the groundbreaking fashion designers of the past 50 years. Yohji Yamamoto showed us that tailoring could be treated as a set of rules that, like a melody in the hands of a jazz musician, could be riffed and reworked into something funny, inventive, mischievous. Rei Kawakubo of Comme de Garçons convinced us that fashion can drive intellectual inquisition as rigorously as abstract art. Junya Watanabe has shown how the simplistic shapes of workwear can be transformed into the sublime.

And what of Abe? Her garments reveal the ideal, the possibilities, of what our chaotic and contradictory world could be: delightful, surprising and strangely harmonious.

Many designers these days are so stuck creatively that they’ve become obsessed with the dull perfection of things such as the trouser or cashmere sweater. Abe is stoked by constant invention and, she tells me again and again, joy. What appears to be a straightforward workwear T-shirt from the front may have a back of pleated technical fabric that billows like a gown. What looks like two pieces of outerwear layered by a frenetic woman facing her city’s brief period of arctic absurdity is in fact just one, a cropped nylon bomber Frankensteined onto a full-length classic trench coat.

Abe works with an encyclopedia of globally recognizable clothes, mostly workwear and business attire: the tee, the blazer, men’s shirting, the trench coat, the shirtdress, the sweatshirt, the peacoat. But rather than glorifying or exoticizing any one garment, Abe merges them into pieces that represent one of our rare examples of compromise as beauty.

In some weird way, these complicated clothes make life easier: You throw on this creation, slip inside this one-piece machine of style, and go about your day. “You might look at it and think, What’s happening?” said Kris Kim, whose New York store LaGarconne has carried the label for nearly a decade. “But when you get up close, it’s a little jacket that’s easy to wear. You might have all the pleats in the back or a few hardware pieces sticking out, and you’re trying to make sense of it all. But really, when you put it on, it ends up not being fussy at all.”

“When she started the brand, she felt that there was a limit to designing something that doesn’t exist,” relayed Abe’s interpreter. “She loves simple things like denim, shirts and cardigans, but she was more about coordinating them. But then she realized instead of just the styling [of the garments], maybe she could move this into the design – having two different garments together. She tried the hybrid of two different styles, and then created something completely different.”

Fusion, or balance, is the thesis of Abe’s world. She is not the household name sort of designer – she rarely dresses celebrities. Maybe she is best known for her collaborations, which range from cultural touchpoints and personal obsessions such as “The Big Lebowski” – a half-tee, half-pinstripe shirt from 2019 that reads, “THAT RUG REALLY TIED THE ROOM TOGETHER” – and Carhartt in 2023, to behemoth companies like Nike and Cartier. Her Nike VaporWaffles, which look like two competing sneaker styles combining in some manic conspiracy of speed, were named by GQ one of the greatest Nike collaborations of all time.

She’s equally as admired by cerebral women who describe themselves as “addicted” to fashion, such as New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. “The Orchid Thief” author, who often writes about Sacai on her Substack, found refuge in Sacai after the clothes at Comme des Garçons, where Abe worked before launching her own line, evolved over the past decade into sculptural masses of fabric that the writer found less suited to daily life. “I want something that I really can put on with a pair of jeans and go to my desk,” Orlean said. “Sacai really made that happen for me, where I still felt delighted. I guess that’s what I want: to be delighted by the clothing. And also I want to feel like I look good. I won’t give that up in the interest of art.”

“That Sacai seems complicated, but it’s easy to wear – that’s very important. We always want to make something that can be very wearable,” Abe said through her interpreter. “She works very closely with the patternmakers and the sewers. Every day, even this morning, they communicate: Is this too much? Is this something that may not be wearable, or it’s going to be uncomfortable when wearing? They communicate a lot. In a way it’s very experimental, but even if it looks complicated, it has to look wearable.”

Abe was finishing her Spring 2025 collection when we spoke; it showed in Paris a few weeks later. She had been working with one team for over a week on just one piece. “Sometimes she feels that it’s going too far, so she reviews it and goes back and forth.” Her team works on a calendar, but she wants to give her staff “the freedom to be very creative.”

During Paris Fashion Week, Abe’s name kept popping up as a contender for the open job at Chanel. Vogue reported that she had just opened an office and showroom in Paris and Harper’s Bazaar suggested she might be “harboring another little secret” – the most plum job in the fashion industry.

Her collection certainly looked like an audition. It was extraordinarily long and lean: denims, plaids and tweeds in black and white. As most designers’ clothes have gotten more and more outrageous, and especially bulbous, Abe has even streamlined her silhouettes. She may be the only person making clothes that cost more than $1,000 that can be worn on public transportation without worrying about stains or stray hems caught in doors.

Regardless of whether Abe is headed to Chanel, she shares with Coco Chanel an ability to bring fashion, at the high end, into lockstep with the tempo of contemporary women’s lives.

Chanel gave women a simplified, radically wearable wardrobe that was grounded, like Abe’s clothes, in a mix of men’s and women’s apparel: the black dress, the jersey suit, the comfortable heel. What does wearable really mean? In the case of both designers, it means functional, not merely in a technical way but as an expression of style or charisma without compromising the person in the clothes. Both borrow something from menswear more significant than tailoring or comfort: freedom.

Abe’s clothes aren’t merely science experiments, after all. “I think if you were just in a very academic way, sewing together clothes that just don’t work together, it would fail,” Orlean said. She wears them to walk her dog, to sit at her desk, to throw parties and attend them. “I’m not subordinate to the clothing. The clothing really works in a very wearable way. But still, I feel there’s an intellectual statement about nuance and about fluidity that I really appreciate.”

And the clothes burnish a cult around a woman who is admirably committed to her own passions. As she summed it up through her interpreter: “Chitose chooses to do things only that she purely loves.”