All clothing by Kakan Kudo, shoes by Sellenatela
It Takes Time: KAKAN
/ interview / FASHION
photographer FLORIE BERGER
creative direction + production SARAH MICHELLE
models CHII AT MILLE MANAGEMENT AND ANNA AT BAZOOKA MANAGEMENT
make up NANA OTA
hair YUICHIRO TAGUCHI
words SIMONE KONU-RAE
There's something unhurried about talking to Kakan Kudo, even when the conversation turns to something as tender as a newborn son. "Lately, my window has been my son, who is almost three months old," she tells us, when asked what she sees from where she sits. "The most ordinary moments seem endlessly fascinating to him. Watching him has made me wonder what the world looks like before we learn to name it. That has become my window." It's an unexpected answer, and a telling one. Kudo, it turns out, is drawn less to what's finished and named than to what's still forming.
That instinct runs straight through her work. "I'm Kakan Kudo, founder and creative director of KAKAN," she says simply, when we ask who she is.
"I make clothes that explore the relationship between the body, emotion, and craftsmanship. Through knitwear in particular, I'm interested in how clothing can hold memory, movement, and the traces of human touch."
It's a gentle way of describing something quite ambitious: clothing that carries something of the person who made it, and the person who wears it, inside its fibres.
KAKAN, as she describes it, is "a Tokyo-based fashion label that moves between ready-to-wear and craftsmanship. Alongside everyday garments, we create hand-spun, hand-knitted pieces made from raw wool."
"I think of clothing not simply as something we wear," she adds, "but as something that breathes, moves, and grows alongside the body."
There's no separation, in her mind, between the object and the life around it.
The current collection carries a phrase that could almost be a mission statement: WILD, NOT PURE.
"I wanted to question the belief that beauty exists only in purity or perfection," Kudo explains. "To me, beauty also lives in instinct, contradiction, and vulnerability."
Knitwear, for Kudo, is the only material that could hold that idea honestly. "It stretches, adapts, and changes with the body," she says. It means the garment isn't finished the moment it leaves Kudo's hands. Wear it, feel it, live in it, and it keeps changing, taking on the instinct of whoever's inside it. The wearer becomes a collaborator in the life of a Kakan knit.
