Akira Isogawa was born in Kyoto in 1964 and emigrated to Australia in 1986, at the age of 21. His first years in Sydney had nothing to do with fashion: he worked in Japanese restaurants and as a tour guide before enrolling to study fashion at East Sydney Technical College, where he drew on contemporary Japanese design. Even as a student his work attracted notice, and a number of the elaborate costumes he made in those years survive in the Powerhouse Museum's catalogued record of Sydney's RAT party era.
In 1993 he opened a shop in Woollahra, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, and built his label, Akira, from there. The line concentrates on womenswear and is known for a meeting of Japanese and Australian sensibilities: layered and wrapped silhouettes, delicate surface work and a textile-led approach in which the cloth often carries the idea.
By the late 1990s he had an international reputation. The label has been sold in Australia and New Zealand and in a further ten countries, and he became one of the few Australian designers to show and sell in Paris. In 1999 the Australian Fashion Industry Awards named him both Designer of the Year and Womenswear Designer of the Year.
Formal recognition followed. In 2005 he was one of six designers featured in Australia Post's Australian Legends stamp series, alongside Collette Dinnigan, Carla Zampatti, Joe Saba, Jenny Bannister and Prue Acton. In 2007 he was named Australia's first Fashion Laureate.
Isogawa's practice has always extended beyond the runway. He has designed costumes for Sydney Dance Company, and his prints have been translated into three rug collections with Designer Rugs: a first collection in 2005, "Kisetsu" in 2007 and "Hirameki" in 2012. His work has been exhibited in major Australian galleries, and Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (the Powerhouse) mounted the retrospective Akira Isogawa in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 his work was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk in London, placing him within the long history of the garment of his birthplace.
When he founded the label he brought old family kimonos back from Kyoto and took them apart, cutting dresses from the aged silk of their linings. The kimono's quality of appearing sombre outside while hiding colour within became a lasting principle: "The only person who knows what's going on [within] the garments is yourself," he has said, describing "some sort of secret luxury". His first solo collection, at Australian Fashion Week in May 1997, was bought in its entirety by Joan Burstein for Browns in London, and from 1998 he showed in Paris twice a year while presenting resort collections in Sydney. A beaded and embroidered gown from 1999 was dubbed "the dress that saved Sydney" by the fashion editor Marion Hume, after visiting buyers found little else to admire that season. Cate Blanchett, who owns many of his pieces, has called them "precious works of art".
The label has remained independently owned throughout, and Isogawa is an advocate of slow fashion. "Style should last," he told The Guardian. "Buy less ... Buy wisely so therefore you produce less waste." The 2018–19 Powerhouse retrospective gathered more than 200 garments across womenswear, menswear and bridal; among his other honours is a fashion excellence award in 2006.
He holds firm views on animal welfare and has built them into his design philosophy, favouring alternatives to animal-derived materials. "I consider myself a compassionate member of society," he has said, questioning why the industry "resorts to such cruelty when there are so many man-made materials that we can use." In 2011 he joined the council of Voiceless, the Australian animal protection institute.
Isogawa remains a reference point for a generation of Australian designers: a migrant who arrived without connections, trained locally, and built a quiet, internationally respected label on craft and restraint rather than spectacle.