Turning Japanese
Western designers are picking up surprising business tips in Asia's hippest country
By Greg Lindsay

Spring 2005 Style & Design

Burberry's signature plaid first appeared on the streets of Tokyo more than 30 years ago, but it wasn't until recently that its customers there started teaching the venerable brand new tricks for applying the check.

The company helped blaze the trail that other Western luxury brands followed in Japan for decades. It partnered with native retailers and licensees who promptly stamped the plaid on everything from golf shirts and golf bags to the umbrellas toted everywhere by salarymen. Designers and executives regularly tweaked colors and shapes, offered special products and even produced separate ad campaigns (think of Bill Murray's TV commercial in Lost in Translation), none of which had ever been seen in the West. Today the company is Japan's most popular fashion brand. The story could have ended there, with Burberry, like its luxury peers, convinced that Japan's baffling take on consumer culture demanded a unique approach to the market.

But then Christopher Bailey began paying closer attention. The brand's creative director started borrowing a few local partners' smaller inventions and taking them to the West. Cell-phone and iPod cases originally inspired by Japan's gadget-mad consumers began popping up in New York City. The breakthrough came last April, when Bailey dusted off a plaid from the archives and issued a one-shot line of trench coats and accessories in honor of Burberry's latest Tokyo flagship opening. The line sold out immediately. But rather than write off the phenomenon as sui generis Japanese, Bailey decided to export the idea. "More than take away just one product from Japan, what we've learned is an entire way of working," he says. "We realized that we need to do this in other regions as well, creating exclusive things for our stores in Italy, for example. That was all born from the way Burberry is working in Japan."

It's no secret that many fashion houses would fold overnight if Japanese consumers suddenly lost their mania for luxury goods. But the flow of inspiration and ideas eastward in the form of fashion and of hard currency westward has switched directions in recent years. "There used to be this trend where you used to design special things for the Japanese market, but I think that's completely changed," says Tomas Maier, creative director of Bottega Veneta. "The customers there are very, very sophisticated and request items that we haven't even thought of yet in Europe or America."

Designers like Bailey and Maier have now turned to Japan as a source of inspiration. Japan is making its presence felt in Bailey's graphic prints for Burberry's Prorsum line this spring as well as in Marc Jacobs' full skirts at Louis Vuitton, John Galliano's funky prints at Dior and Prada's omnipresent key rings.

The cross-pollination extends to retail. Besides the current vogue for limited editions (originally inspired by Japanese streetwear labels), Comme des Garçons has subverted the megastore strategy of Western brands like Prada (and its $80 million Tokyo "epicenter" store) with guerrilla shops in Berlin and Barcelona. "In Tokyo they really want something that is special and of the moment, and one of the things we do in Japan that amplifies this is limited-edition products," Coach executive creative director Reed Krakoff says of his own experiments.

Robert Duffy, president of Marc Jacobs, has adopted a similar strategy, selling quirky products like surfboards and sleeping bags at the Marc by Marc Jacobs store in New York City. Duffy has also become aggressive about growing the Marc Jacobs brand in Japan. Jacobs' Murakami handbags for Louis Vuitton—the best match of Japanese Pop art and fashion yet devised—have been a runaway hit around the world, although much less so in Japan. Meanwhile, Duffy says, he can sit in a Tokyo café and "watch two girls walk in wearing head-to-toe Marc Jacobs. When I was in Seoul, I saw the same thing. When I'm in Paris, I see the same thing. It's globalization. Although they do want more autographs from Marc [in Japan]."

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