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Naoki Takizawa

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Japanese designer who succeeded Issey Miyake at ISSEY MIYAKE, later led design at Uniqlo, now heads design at MUJI.

Naoki Takizawa is the designer who succeeded Issey Miyake inside ISSEY MIYAKE itself: he took over the menswear line in 1993 and the womenswear line in 1999, running both as creative director until he left the house in 2006. He was not an outside hire brought in after Miyake's retirement — he had worked inside the Miyake Design Office since 1980 — and he was the first person to hold either title after Miyake himself. That handover is the central fact of his career, and it is often misdated: company and encyclopedic accounts converge on 1993 and 1999 as the years he took each line, and 2006 as the year of his final show, though the finale is more commonly remembered by its season name, Spring/Summer 2007, which is when the confusion with "2007" as a departure year originates. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

He later became design director of Uniqlo, a role frequently rounded off in English coverage to "2011–2017." The primary record does not support that span: Takizawa held the title of Design Director from 2011 to 2014, then moved into a differently named post, Design Director of Special Projects, which he held until 2023. As of September 2026 he no longer works for Uniqlo at all; since 2024 he has directed the apparel design office at MUJI and served as design director of MUJI Labo, while also continuing his own label, NAOKI TAKIZAWA, which he relaunched in 2024. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

From Kuwasawa to the Miyake Design Office

Takizawa was born in Tokyo; his own company's biography states only that he was born there, without giving a year, though Wikidata and both the Japanese and English Wikipedia entries independently record 19 July 1960, a date this profile treats as reliable but not independently primary-sourced. He trained not at Bunka Fashion College, the school most Japanese designers of his generation attended, but at the Kuwasawa Design School, in its dress design department, graduating in 1980. (Wikidata; NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

He joined the Miyake Design Office the same year he graduated, according to the company's own profile page. Several Japanese press accounts instead give 1982, including a first-person WWDJapan interview conducted after Miyake's death, in which Takizawa recalls joining the Paris collection team — a later step — in 1989: "私は1989年に「イッセイ ミヤケ」のパリコレチームの一員となりました" ("I became a member of the ISSEY MIYAKE Paris collection team in 1989"). Both the 1980 and 1982 figures are therefore in circulation, and this profile cannot resolve which is correct; what is consistent across every source is that he spent his first years designing Plantation, one of the Miyake group's other labels, before moving to the mainline. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN; WWDJapan)

In 1991 he was named design associate to Issey Miyake — a role that sits between assistant and successor, translating a principal designer's direction into a full collection while the principal's name still carries the label. Two years later, Miyake handed him the menswear line outright. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

Two successions: menswear in 1993, womenswear in 1999

In 1993, Miyake gave Takizawa full creative responsibility for menswear, which began appearing as ISSEY MIYAKE MEN BY NAOKI TAKIZAWA. Miyake's own trust in him predated the formal appointment: as design associate, Takizawa had already designed costumes for William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet production of As a Garden in this Setting in 1992, a year before the menswear title changed hands. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

The second, larger succession came in 1999, when Miyake stepped back from actively designing the womenswear collection and Takizawa took on that line as well, holding both concurrently. This made him — alongside Dai Fujiwara, who would later succeed him on the womenswear side — one of only a small number of designers ever to lead a Miyake-founded collection in Miyake's own name while Miyake was still alive and still active in the business, chiefly through the textile-research arm that became Reality Lab. Takizawa's tenure ran until a final Paris show in 2006, for the Spring/Summer 2007 collection, at which point he left the company. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

A minority of secondary sources compress this timeline differently, dating his menswear creative directorship from 1994 and the womenswear addition from 2000 rather than 1993 and 1999. Where the primary company record and a run of independent secondary accounts (encyclopaedic and press) agree, this profile follows 1993 and 1999; the 1994/2000 variant is noted here because it recurs often enough in resale and reference contexts to be worth flagging rather than silently discarding. (Fashion Press)

Collaboration and uniform design as a working method

Through the 1990s and 2000s Takizawa used outside collaborators as a design tool rather than a marketing device, a method also associated with his contemporary Junya Watanabe. He worked with the artist Takashi Murakami on the ISSEY MIYAKE MEN BY NAOKI TAKIZAWA 2000 Spring/Summer collection, and with the artist Aya Takano on a 2004 Autumn/Winter collection titled Journey to the Moon, built around her painting of the earth as seen from the moon. He also directed the design of Novembre, a 2004 photobook collaboration with the photographer Daido Moriyama. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

Uniform design became a parallel practice that outlasted his time at Issey Miyake. In 2004, while still at the house, he designed staff uniforms for the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. He returned to functional, mass-context design repeatedly afterwards: security-guard uniforms for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014, crew uniforms for the East Japan Railway Company's luxury sleeper train TRAIN SUITE Shiki-shima in 2017, and, announced in 2025, pilot uniforms for All Nippon Airways, the airline's first redesign in 37 years. Read together with his later work at Uniqlo, this body of uniform commissions reads less as a side interest than as the throughline of his post-Miyake career: clothing engineered for a specific, unglamorous function, for people who are not paid to be looked at. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

After ISSEY MIYAKE: an independent label, and its difficulties

Takizawa established NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN INC. in 2006, the year he left Issey Miyake, and launched his eponymous label the following year with a Spring/Summer 2008 collection at New York Fashion Week. The label did not sustain a conventional runway calendar: after three seasons it suspended regular collection presentations and continued largely through personal orders, a considerably smaller commercial footprint than his years designing two lines for a major Paris house. Alongside NAOKI TAKIZAWA he also co-developed naoki, a women's sportswear label with the apparel company Sanyo Shokai, for two seasons in 2009 and 2010. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

He did not disappear from fashion during this period — from 2010 to 2012 he was creative director of Helmut Lang's menswear line, and from 2009 to 2013 he held a project professorship at the University of Tokyo's Intermediatheque, where he staged a four-part collection series, Mode & Science by NAOKI TAKIZAWA — but the independent-label chapter reads as the one clearly difficult stretch in an otherwise steadily ascending career. NAOKI TAKIZAWA did not return to a full seasonal schedule until 2023, when Takizawa presented a new collection, daydreams, at China Fashion Week by invitation, followed in 2024 by a rebrand of the label around a "Designer's Athletics Wear" concept and a flagship store in Tokyo's Daikanyama district. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

Uniqlo: from design director to special projects

Takizawa's involvement with Uniqlo began around 2010 and became formal in 2011, when he was named design director. In 2013 he led the development of LifeWear, the concept that has since defined Uniqlo's design philosophy: clothing built as a neutral, technically considered basic rather than a seasonal fashion statement, meant to improve daily life rather than perform newness. In 2014 his title changed to Design Director of Special Projects, a post distinct from the original design directorship and one he held for nine years, through 2023. Under that title he directed two of Uniqlo's best-known outside collaborations — with the French style figure Inès de la Fressange, from 2014 to 2024, and with the editor Carine Roitfeld, from 2015 to 2017 — and, in 2012, designed on-court apparel for the tennis players Kei Nishikori, Novak Djokovic and Shingo Kunieda, working with Toray on the moisture-wicking fabric used in the kit. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

That is a meaningfully different story from the "2011–2017" shorthand sometimes given for his time at Uniqlo: he held two distinct titles across thirteen years, not one title across six, and his design-director role there outlasted the Roitfeld collaboration by six years. He left Uniqlo in 2023 and moved to MUJI the following year. (NAOKI TAKIZAWA DESIGN)

Labels, dating and how to read the work

A garment carrying an ISSEY MIYAKE MEN tag from between 1993 and 2006 is, by definition, a Takizawa-era piece; a womenswear ISSEY MIYAKE piece from 1999 to 2006 is as well, since he held sole creative responsibility for both lines across those windows. As with any designer's tenure at a house that continues producing after their departure, retail delivery can lag a runway season by months, so a tag alone narrows a piece to a tenure window rather than proving the exact collection it belongs to; for the fuller line structure and the house's date-code system, see how ISSEY MIYAKE's lines and codes work. Because press accounts disagree by roughly a year at each end of his ISSEY MIYAKE tenure (1993 versus 1994 for menswear, 1999 versus 2000 for womenswear), a piece dated right at either boundary is harder to attribute with confidence than one from the middle of the run.

His own-name labels require separate handling and should not be confused with each other or with his ISSEY MIYAKE work. NAOKI TAKIZAWA ran as a seasonal collection only from 2007 to roughly 2010, then continued as personal-order work until a 2023–2024 relaunch under the "Designer's Athletics Wear" concept — so a piece bearing that label could plausibly date from either the original 2007–2010 run or the post-2023 relaunch, and the two eras differ considerably in silhouette and positioning. naoki, the separate women's sportswear line with Sanyo Shokai, ran only in 2009 and 2010 and should not be read as a continuation of NAOKI TAKIZAWA. None of his design work for Uniqlo or MUJI carries his name on the garment at all; it is identifiable only through the specific collaboration lines (Uniqlo × Inès de la Fressange, Uniqlo × Carine Roitfeld) or through contemporaneous press coverage naming him as design director, since neither retailer credits an individual designer on a standard label.

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