Ask Josie Natori about her signature aesthetic and she has the following descriptors on hand: East-West, Embroidery, Feel-good, Prints. But those are just some of the ways to describe the designer who is celebrating 40 years in fashion. Elegant should be added to the list.
“I just love beautiful things,” Natori says, during a perfectly-appointed lunch at her midtown showroom recently. “I don’t just like to look,” she added with a smile, “I like to buy.”
Her appreciation of beauty reaches far and wide, from art and music to haute couture. She has been a couture customer from 1981 through Christian Dior’s collections by Raf Simons.
It’s this appreciation for the finer things that permeates every aspect of the designer and her eponymous brand, which, she says, was the result of “an accident” four decades ago.
“I was an investment banker, and I got bored,” Natori recalls. “I knew I wanted to have my own business—Ken and I did – and it was a question of what business.”
This was the early 1970s when she and her husband began to explore several options – a McDonald’s franchise, a car wash, for example – but Natori was looking for a business that would allow her to connect with the exquisite craftsmanship from her native Philippines.
“I needed to do something that I could relate to, and I started exploring what products I could sell,” she says. “While I was still at Merrill Lynch, I experimented with baskets and furniture reproductions, but it was the third try – an embroidered blouse – that sparked the idea. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas, nor was I trained in this or had anybody telling me what to do. In a way, I was a fish out of water.”
When department stores bought her collection for the lingerie departments rather than their blouse ones, Natori’s fashion career in innerwear-as-outerwear took off and she’s dominated the area since.
“There was no fashion in that area,” she recalls. “It was a commodity. I didn’t have any background in lingerie. I just liked clothes so I approached it as that—clothes. I took a common thing, the blouse, and built around it to make it unique.”
She has plenty of fond memories—of meeting creative, of the apartment she kept in Paris, of flying on the Concorde. Her philosophy has remained the same throughout.
“I believe women work very hard and that indulgence is a necessity,” she says. “I believe in bringing art into one’s life in what she wears and what she lives without sacrificing comfort, feeling good and being stylish 24/7”.
With four decades under her belt, she has some valuable advice for designers looking to build their own brand.
“Understanding what your niche is, whether within a category or an area or a product, is an important thing for survival,” she says. And, “I got the attention of buyers I think because I was willing to listen. I didn’t tell them, you have to buy this. If somebody said to me, ‘Can you make this in green,’ I did it. If they said, ‘Can you make this short, I would.’ I didn’t know any better.”
If she could do it all over again, she would. “Ignorance is bliss. I am glad I learned on the job. Having no preconceived ideas allowed me to carve a niche in this industry. I do not believe in regrets….mistakes became important learning points.”
Natori is excited about the future. In 2016, she named her son Kenneth Natori (pictured) president of the company. “There is so much opportunity but the framework has to be different,” she says. “The traditional approach is over which is exhilarating to me. I want to take Natori and make sure that it will still be relevant for the next generation. Natori is based on a feel-good concept and I don’t think the appreciation of beautiful things and the desire to feel good will go away. The best is yet to come.”
View the video celebrating 40 years of Natori here.