Fashion's New Religion

If architecture is fashion's latest passion, Tadao Ando is its ''Sexiest Man Alive.''

As major designers snap up big-name modern architects to design their homes, stores and offices, this Japanese maverick appeals to figures as diverse as the famously baroque Karl Lagerfeld and the minimalist Giorgio Armani. A former boxer who won the Pritzker Prize (architecture's Oscar), Ando is renowned for work that appears both monumental and human.

Before his latest fling with fashion, Ando did an unbuilt project for Esprit in the 1980's. But his status as a fashion icon was assured when Karl Lagerfeld commissioned him to design a studio-retreat in Biarritz, France. That led to a museum housing the art collection of the fashion mogul François Pinault. Armani asked Ando to design a fashion theater, soon to open in Milan. And last year, Ando finished renovating a 17th-century villa for Benetton. What has Ando got that fashion wants? A lot:

1. Subtlety. While modern-minimalist design is the preferred backdrop for retail stores today, Ando's architecture goes way beyond that, managing to be physically compelling without being competitive; in other words, it won't upstage the clothes. Not to mention the bigger-than-life figure who dwells within.

2. Brashness. Fashion loves a character, and Ando is that. The architect, a real iconoclast in conformist Japan, was a professional boxer drawn to the design of Buddhist temples before he apprenticed to a carpenter and then taught himself architecture.

3. Passion. He isn't afraid to call on skills honed in a past career (see above) in defense of his art. Ando once got into a fistfight with a worker who tossed a cigarette butt into a fresh batch of his ''smooth as silk'' concrete. And it wasn't the first time Ando lost it, either. Did he regret his actions? ''I'll quit architecture when I lose that emotion,'' he answered.

4. H2O. Lagerfeld became smitten with Ando's work after seeing photographs of his buildings that featured water, like his Buddhist Water Temple; Armani's theater complex has a liquid courtyard. To fashion designers who deal in artifice daily, the use of simple, elemental materials like concrete and wood is irresistible.