Aya T. Kanai is Pulling Strings

Photos by Ray Lee

Aya T. Kanai is exhausted from a red-eye flight from L.A. where she attended a tradeshow. She is insistent about how unglamorous fashion can be.

How paying your dues in the absolute dregs of the fashion masthead involves hauling racks of clothes across town and irate four a.m. phone calls from Hawai’i disturbing your slumber in New York, demanding to know where the red lightning bolt earring is. In Hawaii. “You just have to eat shit,” Kanai explains. But this 29-year-old has happily paid her dues because she is passionate about her career.

As fashion director of Nylon magazine, Kanai is perched atop the bastion of downtown cool. Her signature Nylon looks evoke a spirit of youthful fun, inimitable coolness, and on-the-money fashion sense. The 29-year-old carries herself with the confidence of a person who’s already asked herself the tough questions, and her answers are forthright, tempered by self-deprecating humor. “I don’t think I’m saving any lives,” she says more than once during her interview, “or changing the world at all.”

And yet there are stakes. The current generation of single, young females with disposable incomes has incredible power in the consumer market, a power that their mothers and grandmothers did not have. As these young women use fashion to experiment with their changing identity and role in society, nailing the look of this girl is a precarious and often contradictory task: “There is a youthful element to women like us,” says Kanai. “I want to be young, but I also want to be seen as grown-up. It needs to feel colorful and intriguing, but it can’t look like it’s for a 16-year-old. It’s more of a sociological question than it is fashion-related.”

Kanai considers herself a gatekeeper, choosing what runway looks are relevant for her readers. In a world of fashion glut, the editor has become an indispensable tastemaker. “I don’t think that my job is any less creative than a designer’s job,” says Kanai. “There are enough clothes out there in the world; I don’t need to be making them. It’s almost more important to be an editor than anything else.”

The Manhattan-bred Kanai attended Oberlin College, double-majoring in visual arts and religion with a minor in East Asian studies. The strings she started pulling early in her creative career are probably not the ones you’d expect: “I got interested in sculpture, and through that, I started making puppets,” she says. “Suddenly I had all this stuff and nothing to do with it, so I started performing.” The esoteric field of puppetry captivated Kanai’s imagination. After graduating, she won the prestigious Watson fellowship, which grants about 30 students the money to travel and pursue any field of study for an entire year. Kanai traveled to Poland, the Czech Republic, France, England, and Japan to study experimental and traditional puppet theater. Afterwards she returned to New York and got involved in the experimental puppet scene, performing at spaces like La MaMa and St. Ann’s Warehouse.

When Kanai discusses puppetry, her voice is charged with the purified zeal of an artist: “You start with very mundane materials, and you create something that can force other human beings to believe they’re alive. That suspension of reality is what interested me about puppetry in the first place. It’s a very unusual human characteristic, to be able to make that choice. When you achieve that, it’s like magic.” But Kanai learned that the intoxication of that magic and actually creating it are not one and the same. This unhappy realization culminated in 2002, when she performed in Obon with the Seattle Repertory Theater. The grueling repetition of eight performances a week made her realize she could perform in her sleep, and the rote roboticism of the whole thing turned her off. Kanai realized that “you can have a passion about multiple interests, but it doesn’t need to be your paycheck.”

The other passion of her life has always been fashion. After leaving the world of puppetry, she plunged in headfirst. For Kanai, there is a ready parallel between puppetry and fashion: “Puppetry is all about taking an inanimate object and giving it life. Starting with a lump of something and transforming it into something else. My job is to take a pile of stuff and make it come to life.” Given her penchant for the obscure and theoretical, and her connections—her mother is head of Issey Miyake’s New York office—you might assume she would have a career designing for an avant-garde label like Comme des Garçons. But Kanai is staunchly grounded in the real. She says, “I recognize [those labels] as an influence of mine, but I don’t actually shoot those clothes very often. I’m not entirely sure what relevance it has in 2007. Until I figure that out, I want to do stories that feel relevant to myself and the magazine.” This careful consideration of what will resonate with readers is part of what makes her work successful.

“I work best when I have multiple concerns,” Kanai explains. “I really like problem-solving. The needs of the business, creative needs, what is Nylon, who is this girl, how can we achieve all these things at the same time?”

Maybe Kanai has simply become a different kind of puppetmaster, managing large teams of people: stylists, photographers, makeup artists, hairdressers, art directors, celebrities, and models. All while making sequined dresses, striped stockings, cropped jackets, and platform wedges come to life.