Top fashion designer visits NZ

Akira Isogawa has reportedly moved fashion editors to tears through the mastery and beauty mulberry handbags of his clothing designs. This week he's in New Zealand, writes fashion editor Carolyn Enting.

Zen for Akira Isogawa is sleeping. The trouble is, the celebrated Japanese-born Australian designer doesn't get as much shut-eye as he would like.

When I first interviewed Isogawa, 45, in his Surry Hills workroom in Sydney in 2003, he had a fit of the giggles after I commented on the Zen-like nature of his clothes and inquired about the Zen principles he must obviously live by to produce such beauty in a garment. He'd worked the past 21 days non-stop, most days until 2am, surviving on just four hours sleep a day. There was nothing Zen about his lifestyle.

Fast forward to 2011 and the only thing that has changed is that Isogawa is busier. The schedule for the past few weeks has been intense: showing at Paris Fashion Week; overseeing the delivery of his autumn-winter 2011 collection; production mulberry alexa of his spring-summer 2011-2012 collection; designing the costumes for the upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet for the Australian Ballet; attending the opening of the Melbourne Fashion Festival; and flying to Dunedin for iD Dunedin Fashion Week to judge the iD Emerging Designer Awards and give a lecture.

"My indulgence is sleep, though it changes. Sometimes indulgence is having a beautiful bath," Isogawa says. "But at the moment it would be sleep because my schedule for the past few weeks has been intense. Sleep is so important for resting the mind and keeping your sanity."

One place Isogawa finds some sort of Zen calm is at work, though at the weekend. "I normally work during the weekend as it is quiet and peaceful. It's a lovely thing to do, I think, especially if it's creative work because it's so quiet. I can't think creatively when a number of people are talking to or around me." Sydney has been home to Kyoto-born Isogawa since 1986. He studied fashion design at the Fashion Design Studio, East Sydney Technical College (now Sydney Institute of Technology) and worked as a restaurant kitchen- hand and a Japanese tour guide to make ends meet. After graduating it took him two years to save enough money to open his own shop in Woollahra, Sydney.

It was then that he had the freedom to buy fabric to produce his own original designs. "I don't see any point making something that other people are designing because you can buy it from them," he says.
This individual approach has been rewarded. In 1997, Joan Burstein, buyer for British store Browns, bought his collection after seeing it at Australian Fashion Week. Since then he has shown twice yearly at Paris Fashion Week. He was named Australian Designer of the Year and Womenswear Designer of the Year (1999); his exhibition Printemps-Ete (2004-2005) was the first solo and textiles exhibition by an Australian designer at the National Gallery of Victoria; his face has appeared on a commemorative Australian Legend postage stamp (2005); and he was the inaugural Australian Fashion Laureate (2007).

In 2008, at Australian Fashion Week, he lifted souls and hearts with a collection so breathtakingly beautiful it left the hardened fashion press spellbound and misty-eyed.

In addition to ready-to-wear, Isogawa has enjoyed many collaborations with the Sydney Dance Company, beginning in 1998, and more recently The Australian Ballet.

His current autumn-winter 2011 collection has been inspired by his most recent project designing the costumes for the upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet for The Australian Ballet.

"It speaks of darkness and romanticism, and within the darkness there is a subtle light. It can express the very nature of the moon, shimmering in the night sky. The colours I selected for the collection were inspired by the subtlety and ambiguous nature of the moon," he says.