IN A SUNNY showroom space on Paris’ left bank, the fashion designer Maiko Kurogouchi has arrived bearing delicately wrapped packages of assorted mochi from Ogata, a beloved Japanese teahouse and restaurant in the city’s Marais neighborhood. “Mochi is my favorite food in the world,” she says of the traditional Japanese rice cakes, counting three visits to Ogata since her arrival in Paris to show her fall 2023 collection earlier that week. We’re a hemisphere away from Tokyo, where Kurogouchi spends most of her year. There, she’s more familiarly known as “Mame” (pronounced “Mah-may”), a childhood nickname that means “bean,” referencing her diminutive size. It’s also the namesake of her brand Mame Kurogouchi, which she launched in 2010 after several years working under the celebrated designer Issey Miyake. The brand now maintains three retail stores in Tokyo.

It’s fair to say she achieved that perfectly balanced amalgam of past-meets-contemporary with one of the very first pieces she designed in 2011: her signature translucent handbag fabricated from PVC, a plastic often used in industrial items. Sculptural in shape, with intricate beading, a fringed trim, and whipstitching, the bag took inspiration from her childhood winters back in Nagano and was produced by a factory that primarily manufactured pool floats. “They’d never made a bag before. I showed them what I wanted, and they were like, ‘What’s this?’” she says, laughing. Most recently, her fall 2023 collection included pieces accented with ribbonlike net trim that was made by a factory specializing in net wrapping for hams.

Though her brand has grown in the last 13 years, Kurogouchi still designs every piece herself, which isn’t entirely surprising considering the personal and often nostalgic nature of her collections. In fact, she once based an entire season’s pieces on daily diary entries.

As much as she loves testing the boundaries of technical production in her work, Kurogouchi equally relishes the history and artistry behind heritage crafts. Her spring 2023 collection was inspired by traditional Japanese basket-weaving techniques, which translated into woven tops and oversized earrings that were both sculptural and surprisingly pliant. Her most recent collection, meanwhile, referenced bamboo baskets again, but this time her focus was on the patterns of shadows created by their shapes and overlapping pieces, which resulted in an abstract graphic print produced with a rare marble-printing technique using individual pieces of colored clay. “It took about a month to make a model,” Kurogouchi said of the meticulously handcrafted components. “It was a very precious thing for me. There’s only one guy who can do it right now, and he’s teaching this technique to his son.”

Like most of Kurogouchi’s pieces, the garments bearing the print are at once functional and gorgeous to the eye. But there’s a depth — the stories and process behind the making — that imbues the pieces with an exquisite rarity, which she assertively sums up: “I want everyone to feel special in my clothes. And if they like what they’re wearing and want to know more about the brand, then it’s possible for them to feel a deeper value. I think Japanese people really appreciate things with meaning. It’s part of our culture.”