september-2011

54 metropolitan
~ insider people ~
SHAPESHIFTERS
Parisian designer/DJ duo Kitsuné may seem a
little ambitious working in fashion and music,
both tricky areas to turn a profit. In fact, they’re
exceedingly smart, says Karl Treacy
with the music industry in a slump, the fashion industry
suff ocated by the clout of fast-fashion giants, owning a brand
that’s half-record label, half-fashion line might seem like
quite a precarious position to fi nd yourself in. Not for Gildas
Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki, though. They seem quite pleased.
When they met in late 1990s Paris, the former was a DJ
and Daft Punk manager from Brittany looking for his next
musical fi x and the latter a Japanese-born music-loving
architect looking for a distraction. Friendship ensued and
aft er repeated bouts of realising they liked the same music
and the same clothes, in 2002 they started Kitsuné, a
Paris-based record label that is also a fashion line.
Kitsuné means “fox” in Japanese. A special type of fox
that, in True Blood parlance, could be described as a shapeshift
er. As monikers go, it’s pretty apt. The division of labour,
though mutable (Kuroki also DJs), is still relatively clear:
Kuroki looks aft er the fashion, Loaëc the music.
Loaëc’s projects this year, on top of the 11th Kitsuné
Maison compilation of cutting-edge tracks from up-andcomers,
also include Kitsuné Parisien – putting the focus on
the new generation of “French Touch” electronic music, in
collaboration with artist/hotelier/night-owl André – and
Gildas Kitsuné Club Night Mix – an album of remixes of recent
discoveries and standards that gives a taste of the French DJ’s
famed international sets.
Discovering new talent is what drives Kitsuné. Trusting
intuition helped launch the careers of The Klaxons and La
Roux. Two Door Cinema Club, whose members hail from
Wales and Northern Ireland, is Loaëc’s main album project at
the moment. He’s been involved with them for four years – an
investment in every sense of the word. And it’s paying off .
Focusing on what you do best is the perceived secret to
success in business. For Kitsuné there are two bests. While
an album might cost €15, a Kitsuné jacket is priced in the
upper hundreds. This is Kuroki’s territory.
Instead of creating a predictable range of mindless
merchandise, he has created a fashion line for men and women
of reassuringly familiar clothes that just happen to be
exceptionally well-made and cut. He works with small fabric
mills and traditional manufacturers, names whose main
clients happen to be luxury houses like Hermès and Chanel.
With each collection named aft er the fi lm that inspired it
(Brokeback Mountain for autumn), the fashion has developed
a remarkable global distribution, hitting all the coolest
stores, including Selfridges, Dover Street Market and Oki-Ni
in London. The own-brand store in Paris sits, charmingly,
behind the Palais Royal.
Collaborations are key, be they with Mackintosh, Petit Bateau
or perfumier James Heeley, or big-league cobblers like Pierre
Hardy and JM Weston. With other brands off ering ever-lower
price points, Kitsuné plays to those willing to pay for quality.
With the recording industry haemorrhaging money, Loaëc is
out of quick fi xes. The Kitsuné ethos is simple: releasing music
because they genuinely like it. “Each year our income grows
and I don’t know why, but it does,” he says, more mystifi ed
than boastful. “In spite of the state of the industry, music is
the thing that excites people the most, especially young
people. For a 15-year-old, it’s the thing that brings the most
emotion, the most memories, something that has a power
incomparable to any other expressive medium. It’s what brings
people together, what they identify with. It remains, despite
everything, something worth defending.” kitsune.fr