“If you want to become the best version of yourself, you first have to acknowledge who you are,” says Charlotte Coupé. From the sound of it, this decade-long LVMH veteran has embarked on a course of self-improvement. However, the object of her scrutiny is not herself, but Kenzo: the house whose future was entrusted to Coupé when she was appointed CEO just over one year ago.

Speaking in her first interview since taking the role, the 43-year-old is refreshingly frank about the task ahead. Her diagnosis is that Kenzo requires a course of reconnection: to its founder’s original proposition, to the reality of the business it currently is, to the client it currently serves, and eventually, to the more successful version of itself she believes it will become. “The dream has to be ambitious,” she says, “but it has to be realistic.”

That recalibration began on Monday at Place des Victoires, where Kenzo opened a week-long activation to the public during Paris Fashion Week Men’s. As of Wednesday, editors will see artistic director Nigo’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection by appointment, alongside the broader public-facing amplification that includes a FW26 pop-up, a flower shop, a Kenzo café, a Japanese konbini, and a T-shirt bar. The result, says Coupé, is intended as an open-to-all “tour of the brand”, rather than a 15-minute spectacle directed solely at the industry.

This will be Kenzo’s second season on the trot without a fashion show. Coupé says: “If we want to exist in fashion week with purpose, with cultural relevancy, it’s probably better to spend the money differently.” She adds: “I’m not saying that we won’t go back on the runway, but this particular format seems to be more relevant and more efficient for a brand like us right now.”

The logic behind that decision rests in Coupé’s unsentimental reading of Kenzo’s position. “We have humble clothes, we have humble products,” she says. “We’re not a luxury house.” Within LVMH, where Kenzo sits alongside some of fashion’s most powerful luxury players, this seems a startling admission. Yet Coupé frames it as a USP that is central to the house’s opportunity within the broader architecture of the group.

That opportunity is rooted in the house’s atypical beginnings outside the rarefied milieu both of Paris and mainstream French fashion. Founder Kenzo Takada was a hotelier’s son from the small Japanese town of Himeji, who traveled to Paris in 1965. He staged his first show in April 1970 at Jungle Jap, his tiny boutique in Paris’s Galerie Vivienne; from there, Takada built a fashion women’s proposition rooted in ebullience and fun rather than distance and froideur. Japanese in authorship, Parisian in setting and uniquely open in spirit, Kenzo was relished for its exuberance in color, print, and movement. Menswear followed in 1983, later formalized as Kenzo Homme, while Kenzo Jeans and Kenzo Jungle (kidswear) extended the house’s reach in 1986.

Takada sold the company to LVMH in 1993 for $80.5 million, making Kenzo one of the earlier fashion houses to be subsumed into what was becoming Bernard Arnault’s apex luxury portfolio. When the designer retired in 1999, LVMH was left with an unusually rich set of codes, but also a challenging conundrum: what should Kenzo mean without Kenzo?

That question has been answered differently under a succession of creative directors since. Nigo was appointed artistic director in 2021 and staged his first Kenzo show on Rue Vivienne, close to the site of Takada’s original boutique and only a short walk from the house’s HQ. His appointment restored Japanese creative authorship to Kenzo, while bringing in his own streetwear source code of Ivy League, Americana, denim, graphic product and 21st century cultural heat.

Part of Coupé’s task, as she sees it, is to clarify the point of intersection between Nigo’s own vocabulary and Kenzo’s inherited codes: how his Ivy League and Americana references might be plugged into a house language of flowers, color and wild animals, and how his authorship can “service the legacy of the brand”.

For Coupé, it is vital to understand that legacy. “We were born as a women’s brand, but we’ve transformed over the years as a men’s brand,” she says. “That’s the reality… you have to take into consideration the initial starting point, together with the recent past.” The plan she has built around that reading starts with product: this is where Coupé sees opportunity in both Kenzo’s imprecise image within the broader fashion landscape as well as the attributes that make it so unusual within the LVMH portfolio, such as price. “In today’s landscape, having the price point that we have is a massive opportunity, as long as we are able to go back to making [high sales] volumes,” she adds.

Kenzo, she emphasizes, is a house that should be able to speak to a wide audience, just as it did during the period of the tiger sweatshirt by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim for FW12, which became a global hit. “Whether you like it or not,” Coupé says, “the time it was successful was the time when the brand was making loads of volume on the tiger.” The lesson of that period is not that Kenzo should return to a single-product formula, but that popularity and reach is nothing to be ashamed of. “You cannot be niche, you cannot only speak to a very small portion of client,” she adds.

Her focus now is on building a broader product architecture that can translate Kenzo’s high awareness into repeatable desire across categories. This has been formalized internally in a three-year plan whose first purpose, she says, is “to bring more clarity to who we are, what our ambition is, and how we want to execute it”, which means raising the quality across all product, image, and retail.

As for the product, womenswear SKUs, Coupé says, need to increase, although she is careful not to suggest that Kenzo should re-emerge as a women’s-driven house. More immediate opportunities lie in categories that already make sense for both Kenzo and Nigo. Denim is the prime example: “Denim is too small at Kenzo, and it should be much higher,” Coupé says, adding that the category currently accounts for less than 10% of the business. Her aim is not only to create occasional fashion jeans, but to build the kind of repeatable fits and washes that can bring customers back season after season. Outerwear is another underdeveloped area, she says, citing windbreakers, Harrington jackets, coach jackets and down jackets.

LVMH customarily does not break out revenue figures and other financials for its fashion houses, a habit that applies to Kenzo. What the house can say is that it operates around 100 stores worldwide, the vast majority of its turnover is generated by ready-to-wear rather than accessories, and its key markets are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region.

Another slice of Coupé’s focus is directed toward Kenzo’s existing client. The Kenzo customer is young, she says, averaging around 38, and while many of them visit regularly, those visits are frustratingly rare. “We have many people who only come once a year to buy one product. So if they only come back once, let’s make them buy two pieces instead of one,” says Coupé, who is also struck by the number of customers that open Kenzo emails, click through to the website, and still do not convert. “Those people are still interested in the brand; they take the time and the energy to open the email and click on the link, but they don’t convert into a sale.”

Solving that, Coupé argues, requires more than the product Nigo and his design team are cooking up for SS27 and beyond. To tackle it, Kenzo needs a sharper expression of itself across image, stores, and service, too. She says the house is now working on everything from product training to clienteling and what she calls “retail excellence”. However, the ambition is not to make Kenzo more solemn. While watching playbacks of Takada’s shows, Coupé was struck by models walking two by two, dancing, smiling, and turning the runway into “a big party”. The clothes themselves, she notes, were sometimes quite conventional; the attitude with which they were displayed was spiked with humor and fun.

“Fashion has become very serious,” she says. “We don’t have to be that type of house.” The amplification in Place des Victoires is intended to express that. She adds one caveat: “Although I don’t want Kenzo to be perceived as a serious brand, it does need to make a serious business.”

Coupé’s route to Kenzo was mapped through the fashion industry jungles of product, merchandising, and retail. After taking degrees at the Sorbonne and ISC Paris, she began in the press department at Issey Miyake in 2003. After a temporary role in retail excellence at Louis Vuitton — where she remembers fervently hoping to be taken on permanently — Coupé was instead recruited to Ralph Lauren’s Geneva headquarters, for a customer service role, in 2006. She quickly moved into merchandising, where she met a mentor she would follow for a decade, first to Lacoste, where she became senior product director for menswear in 2013, and later back to Louis Vuitton, which she joined as men’s ready-to-wear director in 2016.

At Ralph Lauren, she was fascinated by the strength of narrative around products. Coupé recalls collection walkthroughs with Ralph and Jerry Lauren as “one of the most amazing moments” of her career. “It’s not as if they’re reinventing the wheel every season,” she says. “You always have the four-pocket escape jackets, you always have the Harrington, you always have the cable… Somehow, it creates something that, even in your subconscious, roots the brand into something timeless and undisputable.”

At Louis Vuitton, the exec later became business unit director for men’s ready-to-wear. She describes the role as running “a small company within the big company”, with responsibility across studio, merchandising, industrial development, planning, and control. It prepared her for Kenzo, she says, because it required her to consider the creative and commercial parts of the equation as one: “to have a vision for the brand,” to “service the legacy of the brand,” and to work hand in hand with a creative director.

At Kenzo, what first struck her when she joined last May was the energy and the enthusiasm of its people. It seemed like a good sign, because, as much as Coupé’s plan is rooted in the product, client and category mix, she sees her core challenge as cultural. “The shift of culture, the shift of mindset,” she says, “is probably the most complicated part.” During her interview process for the Kenzo gig, she laughs as she recalls being warned that she would go to bed with Kenzo’s problems and wake up with Kenzo’s problems.

“I’m very much aware of the fact that these jobs can be very temporary,” she explains. “So let’s see how long the group lets me play and have fun with the people at Kenzo.” Coupé seems to me like an unusually refreshing CEO, making her a promising fit for an unusual LVMH house that has long required refreshment.