Fashion’s list of long-haul independents is short, the status hard to achieve and harder still to maintain. Among the most notable: Dries Van Noten, Anna Sui and Derek Lam, each in his and her own way both realist and iconoclast.
Josie Natori merits a place on the roster alongside those more obvious names. On Tuesday night she celebrated the Natori Co.’s 40th anniversary with a cocktail party for 250 people including friends, business associates and Natori staffers. It was an event both elegant and understated, much like the woman, whose intense expectations of herself and others are not prone to the kind of rampant self-congratulation that has become au courant in the social-media age. It’s not that she’s given to false modesty, but whether by nature or nurture (most likely a combination of the two), she finds obvious self-celebration tacky.
Yet 40 years is indeed an accomplishment, one even Natori couldn’t let go. Thus, in the lead-up to her fall 2017 collection, she enlisted filmmaker Tim Braun to create a film, which debuted at the party — as chic as it was hastily arranged, Natori having gone back and forth about whether to mark the occasion before ultimately deciding in the affirmative.
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