They met through mutual friends in Paris. Made for each other, they could have married but decided to launch a fashion label instead. Two years later, Kaito Jori and Iku Furudate opened their workshop on Rue Oberkampf and co-signed their first ten pieces. In the meantime they had grown close, discovering a shared fascination for the films of David Lynch and Pasolini, contemporary landscape photography, and fine detailing in clothing design. The two Japanese students born just a few months apart in the late seventies, both émigrés to Paris, were finally ready to embark on the adventure they christened “Commuun”. When they met in 2003, Kaito was finishing his studies at the Art Institute of Arnhem. He had just spent five frenetic years in New York, and took refuge in the Netherlands because he felt a “desire for the countryside.” The brilliant Iku, meanwhile, had completed her three years of fashion design studies at Bunka College in Tokyo and three more years at Central Saint Martins in London. Industrious and ambitious, she won a prize at the Hyères festival before going to work for Sharon Wauchob and later Anne-Valerie Hash, while Kaito was doing his own apprenticeship at Balenciaga. In 2005 they presented their first collection in a showroom on Rue Saint Claude. The duo describe the reaction quite simply: “People liked the mix of refined cuts and organic fabrics.” And since then their byword has been “Continuation”.