Wako Teams Up With Paris’ Ogata for Six-Month Retail Residency

by · WWD
Ceramics by Kai Tsujimura.Courtesy of Wako

TASTING MENU: Wako’s Paris residency at Ogata began, appropriately, over dinner.

Last year, buoyed by the response of a two-week pop-up exhibition around tea and fragrance at the Japanese department store, the elegant Parisian eatery’s founder Shinichiro Ogata and Kiyoko Niwasaki, president and chief executive officer of the retailer, decided to celebrate.

“It was over that dinner that the idea for the [Paris] pop-up began to take concrete shape,” she recalled.

Related Articles

Retail

Le Bon Marché Will Bring Japanese Fashion Archives to the Auction Floor

Financial

Fashion Retailers Mixed on Hiring as September Employment Gains Disappoint

As a result, Ogata is returning the favor by hosting Wako for a six-month residency that ends April 30, taking a portion of the Parisian restaurant’s ground floor.

“We felt that a short event lasting only a few days would not be enough,” Niwasaki told WWD. “We [are] convinced that a full six months, long enough to experience the changing of the seasons, would allow us to become a natural part of local daily life” and allow visitors time to understand the retail company’s “very existence.”

Inside the Wako space at Ogata.Courtesy of Wako

The offering brings together Japanese crafts and contemporary design, spanning bamboo works, ceramics, lacquerware and tea ceremony objects, such as the contemporary take of designer Yosuke Fujii.

Ceramics and lacquer will also be well represented with bold forms shaped with clay and fire by Kai Tsujimura and Kansai Noguchi’s use of metallic powders and mother-of-pearl inlay on lacquer pieces.

Early in the new year, the department store’s in-house Pure Craft ready-to-wear line and Suiha bags will join the selection, timed to coincide with Paris Fashion Week in January, in an approach the CEO described as “culture to be worn.”

Now in its second year of its overseas pop-ups, the Japanese department store is also treating such occasions as a way to understand how its fashion resonates with European consumers, particularly in Paris as “the global epicenter of luxury and art,” she said.

She described bringing Wako’s work to Paris as a way to reconsider Japanese beauty on an international stage and apply the “always one step ahead of the rest” spirit of Seiko founder Kintaro Hattori — the department store is located in the neo-Renaissance building that was once home to the watchmaker’s headquarters.

Rather than “a one-off overseas venture,” Wako’s ambition is to build “a two-way circulation of business and culture,” she said, hoping that in addition to bringing insights from international customers back to its Ginza flagship, getting a taste in Paris would entice them to come to Tokyo as well.

Looking further, the company is considering a longer-term road map that could include other major cities, with London and New York among destinations Niwasaki named.