A Requiem for the Kenzo Tiger Sweater

How One Sweater Tells the History of the Past Ten Years In Fashion

Remember when you could just blog your way to worldwide fame?

I’m exaggerating, but only a little: between 2008 and 2014, there was a glimmering promise that anyone with a dot-blogspot URL and a friend to take decent photos of them could land in the front row of Paris Fashion Week’s most coveted shows, in major advertising campaigns, and in roles advising brands on what to sell and how to sell it. The carefully calibrated machinery of fashion world approval was suddenly threatened, and with it the years-long process of masthead ascension. Remember when people got mad about Tavi wearing an amazing hat in the front row at Dior? Now, that kind of brazen dedication to extreme personal style isn’t something to be feared—it’s the industry’s defining narrative.

Kenzo, the French brand run since 2010 by Opening Ceremony honchos Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, was perhaps the most emblematic fashion brand of that moment, beloved for a tiger-logo sweater. Today, as Leon and Lim announce the end of their run as Kenzo's creative directors, it’s worth looking back on what, exactly, that sweater meant for the fashion world.

One way to ensure digital success in that go-go moment was to just dress your way there, often by securing a must-have item like Balenciaga’s Ceinture boots, the Celine luggage tote, something from Raf Simon’s first collaborations with Adidas, in 2013—or Kenzo’s Tiger Sweater. We talk a lot about “viral” clothing now—janties and Balenciaga’s bootcut jeans—but these “streetstyle bait” pieces, made ubiquitous through aggressive gifting and good old fashioned shopping, were really the first to be “everywhere,” on “everyone.” Appearing in one on your blog, or even better, in a Tommy Ton photograph on Vogue.com, swanning into a show with iPhone and thick paper invite clutched against your Kenzo Tiger pouch, was a sign that you had made it to the industry’s upper echelons.

Leon and Lim introduced the sweater two years into their tenure at the house, for the Fall 2012 collections, at the height of the fashion blogger craze. (Suzy Menkes would write her infamous hit piece for T Magazine about the “fashion circus” of proto-influencers, preening in this street style catnip clothing, ten months later.) “In a mere two seasons, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim have turned Kenzo into one of the hottest shows on the Paris calendar,” Vogue wrote in its review of that collection, noting that “it wouldn't be a surprise to see their logo tiger sweater, a revived house code, everywhere in a few months.” Indeed, the design came from a motif the designers discovered while looking through the brand’s ’60s and ’70s archives, and which Leon asked the atelier to print on a sweatshirt. But—wanna feel old???—the company balked: “The brand has never made a sweatshirt,” Leon told StyleCaster in 2012. “Ever.... They were like, ‘No one buys it.’ And we were like, ‘People buy sweatshirts.’ So we really fought to make these sweatshirts!”

To appease the brand, they also made sweaters—and that combination of the fancy knit with graphic-T casualness sold out in hours. “During the Spring 2013 collections in New York, it seemed like every It-blogger, fashion editor, and model was wearing one, and—making the item all the more tantalizing—the sweaters were not to be found for sale anywhere,” StyleCaster wrote. What made it special was that while anything from Balenciaga or Celine or a pair of fashion sneakers might set you back a few thousand dollars, the Kenzo Tiger Sweater was about $500. “Anyone” could get it, and that finessed the conversation around fashion exclusivity, opening the door for any product to become a must-have, regardless of the price. It was shortly thereafter, remember, that a Supreme T-shirt became the next must-have item for women at fashion week.

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