Chitose Abe is sitting at a conference table in a bare-bones office upstairs at the Paris headquarters of her company, Sacai. The building is a Haussmannian-style hôtel particulier with a stately entrance, but the inside is utterly minimal, with Eiffel-like girders holding up the showroom’s glass canopy roof. Abe is beaming, having just soaked up the last of the congratulations for her men’s and women’s presentation, which is a series of looks arranged on rows of mannequins assembled below us. She says, through an interpreter, that her most recent output is “a return to basics.” But that’s always been true of Sacai.

Since she started the company, in 1999, Abe has created her own language of smartly remixed wardrobe staples—tuxedos, sailor-stripe T-shirts, seersucker, denim, and khaki—and

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