Yumiko Takeshima

Yumiko Takeshima was born in Asahikawa, in the north of Japan, to parents who ran a small kimono business. She grew up around cloth, and around the care a garment asks for. She began dancing at four in Sapporo and left home at fourteen to study at the San Francisco Ballet School. Her first professional contract followed soon after.

In 1993 she moved from New York to the Dutch National Ballet. It was there, alongside dancing, that she began to design, drawn back to cloth from the other side of it, first for herself, then for the stage. In 2002 she launched Yumiko.

Living in Amsterdam, she made costumes for the choreography of David Dawson and William Forsythe, among others, while building the company's made-to-order and ready-to-wear lines. She danced until April 2014. Since then her work has been design alone, the styles, the fabrics, the slow refinement of a single garment she has spent a lifetime understanding from the inside.

The Leotard

Yumiko makes one thing.

Since 2002, the leotard has been the whole of our work, a single garment, returned to and refined rather than added to. It began with a handful of designs by Yumiko Takeshima, a ballerina who couldn't find a leotard that moved the way she did, and so drew her own. Dancers recognised them at once. They still do.

Much of what we make is cut to order. You choose the line, the fabric, the length of a sleeve, the rise of a leg, and the piece is made for one body, yours. Next to the made-to-order work sits an equal collection of ready-to-wear, along with the Black Label, unique, exclusive designs that are most fully Yumiko's own.

Today the leotards are still made by hand in Cazalla de la Sierra, a white town in the Andalusian hills north of Seville, by people who have spent years learning the particular discipline a leotard asks for. Our work has dressed the choreography of William Forsythe and David Dawson, and a great deal of dancing the world never learns a name for.

We don't chase the season. We make the leotard, well, and then we make it again.