Fashioning Japan.
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This is a boutique where fashion meets storytelling. Lining the walls are rails of silk creations, featuring cherry blossom, pine tree, swallow and bamboo screen prints. They make a carousel of colour against the muted decor. "This one is crane fabric," says Swiss-Japanese fashion designer Kazu Huggler. She holds up a candy-pink, silk blouse with a deep purple design. "The crane is a symbol [for] luck," she explains, and tells me how she recently sold a similar piece for a wedding. "Cranes live in monogamy, and stand for long-lasting happiness."
A cultural approach
Taken from Japanese symbolism, the crane is one of many motifs represented in Zurich-based Huggler's ready-to-wear line KAZU, and her couture pieces. "My approach is not a fashionable approach -it became a cultural approach," says the 42-year-old designer, whose designs translate Japanese aesthetics into wearable garments. She shows me an elegant, silk skirt that has a Chojugiga print of animals fighting.
I learn that a monk drew the original. "He was a storyteller through animals. He made fun of religions fighting one another, so he showed frogs and monkeys or rabbits, which were fighting," Huggler laughs. The print comes from Japanese Manga culture (illustrations to tell stories) and is one of a set of four famous picture scrolls, kept in the Kozan-ji temple in Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital of Japan. "I think that is very unique in Japanese textiles--that they are good storytellers," she says.
It is hard not to be completely absorbed by her determined passion, when she talks about the culture upon which she built her business. She began life in Tokyo, but her family moved to Zurich when she was 11. At school, she dreamt of one day going back to the Japanese city with its "intense life." "It was the '80s, and a very enthusiastic and euphoric time," she smiles.
Huggler's interest in Japanese culture was cemented when she returned to Tokyo to study Japanese history of art and aesthetics at the Keio University. "As a child, you learn everything, but it's 'unconscious'," she says. "[With my studies] I was able to go through the entire culture again, but this time with an awareness." At first, she had no interest in becoming a fashion designer--a profession that she thought of as "a girl's dream"--despite the fact that she had made a lot of her own clothes as a teenager.
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The pull of fashion
Following her...
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