Hayate Ichimori is walking through the new Omar Afridi store in Tokyo, where the brand’s AW26 collection is hanging on the rails. I pick up a collared cardigan with ribbed sleeves and tell him it has a cool grandad vibe. “It’s like futuristic ojiichan,” he grinned. It’s not a bad summary: picture a slightly sci-fi, auramaxxed Japanese grandad, and you might get close to the aesthetic that Omar Afridi has refined over the past 8 years.

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Based in London, but headed up by Japanese designers, Omar Afridi’s history is fragmented. Formerly known as Léon Bara, the brand was started by Omar Afridi himself, an Afghan national in his late forties who lives in London. Léon Bara rebranded to Omar Afridi in 2018, with design entrusted to Ichimori, who brought on his friend Jun Kikuta as creative director.

“The easiest way to say it is that he makes the outline of the collection, and then I’m like okay, let me explore the details,” Ichimori explained. “He does macro and I do micro.” Afridi, meanwhile, retains ownership of the brand and oversees operations as its CEO.

Ichimori, 31, and Kikuta, 32, first met in their early twenties while both working in Tokyo at the American brand Freeman’s Sporting Club—Ichimori in the restaurant, and Kikuta in apparel. “Because we were both part-time, they gave us the same locker. On my first day when I arrived I opened my locker and there was a bunch of stuff in there,” said Ichimori. “Jun came in and was like ‘Who are you, touching my locker?!’. And that’s how we met.” The duo realised they were the same age and both looking to move to London after graduating.

Ichimori wears round, wire-framed spectacles and speaks with a British lilt that he picked up from getting drunk and chatting, which is incidentally how I first met him at a house party not long after he’d moved to London back in 2017, where even then I remember him being the best-dressed guy in the room, wearing a floor-length coat he’d designed himself.

The designer arrived in London intending to enrol in Central Saint Martins, but changed course when he met Afridi. After studying fashion at Musashino Art University, Ichimori was recommended to Afridi by his professor, a Scottish fashion consultant based in Tokyo named Patrick Ryan who designs the brand Yab-Yum. “[Patrick] knew that Omar was looking for someone who could design and someone who knew the Japanese market,” he said.

In the years since, Ichimori and Kikuta have built the brand into a formidable if still off-the-radar business: global stockists include Road Sign in Taipei, SVRN in Chicago, Printemps in Paris, Mukta in Kobe, and from the AW26 season it will be available at Komune in NYC. In the past couple of years the brand has also opened flagship stores in both London and Tokyo, which naturally offer the most comprehensive immersion into the brand. Despite being headquartered in the British capital, the brand does half of its sales in Japan, where it has established a cult presence among stylish Tokyoites who appreciate its unusual fabrications and sleek, urban vibe.

Though it occupies the same space in menswear as intelligent, craft-forward brands like Camiel Fortgens and Lemaire, Omar Afridi has retained a kind of closed-off and cultish energy that sets it apart from nearly everything else on the market. The brand does very little press and has only held one runway show (AW23 in London), and does refreshingly little to court the algorithm, instead relying on word of mouth to spread its appeal. At the brand’s store opening in Tokyo late last year, which occupies a three-storey building in the Shinagawa business district, over a hundred friends and fans showed up. Almost all of them were dressed entirely in black clothes from the brand.

Full of austere lines and precise architectural shapes, its dark shades are punctuated by bright colours that range from baby pink to lime green, and textures that include blister jacquard and angora suede, a hairy-looking leather produced by a single artisan in Japan. The circular silver rivets which dot the pockets of its pants and the necks of its jackets are a signature, and make the clothes appear as though they have been assembled with drills and screwdrivers rather than needles and thread. Heritage fabrics, for instance British tweed or pinstriped wool, are warped into cocoon-shaped jackets or hardware-studded skirts.

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Summer is the hardest season to dress well for. There is hardly any layering to play with, and thus a much larger margin for error, which is why the golden trifecta of Giorgio Armani in long shorts, Harrison Ford in short shorts, and The Talented Mr. Ripley have had warm-weather menswear in a chokehold for the past few decades. Time to move on?

During summer in Japan, where the humid air takes on the punishing quality of an overheated indoor swimming pool, people still somehow manage to dress well. I’ve become convinced that the key to this is, instead of immediately devolving into shorts and a T-shirt like most of the tourists here do, is to look to the locals and build a small but mighty collection of breezy-looking button-up shirts.

’Tis the season — brilliant shirts are absolutely everywhere right now, and while shopping content on Wimpy is few and far between (there’s enough of it on Substack), I’ve seen so many lately that I thought it made sense to share them, along with a few other things to buy, drool over, or contemplate.

Below, a list of 20+ things for summer, including where to get the best tank tops, Kapital’s irritating new T-shirt policy, a pair of so-called slutty army shorts, sake-based skincare, and a new brand that’s recycling silk kimonos into camp-collar shirts.

Everything here is chosen simply because I think it’s good; no affiliates, no adverts.

THE SHIRTS

• One of the best things I’ve bought recently is the ‘Boudoir’ shirt by Bourienne Paris, which has ruffled sleeves and a standing frilled collar. It’s a little bit French aristo meets vampire dandy — I’ve been layering like so — but the brand has plenty of other, more palatable styles that are great for summer.

• (Sidenote: I got mine from Mathematics, which is an incredible store in Kanagawa that has the uncanny power to stock every cool brand you’ve never heard of, right before it blows up. More here.)

  

• Akki-Chan is a brand new menswear label that takes apart vintage silk kimonos and reconstructs them into uber-relaxed camp-collar shirts that are all one-of-a-kind, breathing new life into some incredibly special printed fabrics.
  

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There is nothing in the world more pretentious than fragrance. Not art, not music, not even wine. Perfume is spoken about with poetic reverence, and is the only profession in which its experts are officially referred to as a body part: a ‘nose’. Noses enjoy the unique privilege of being able to blend the seriousness of a scientist with the ostentation and delusion of an artist.

The best example of this that I can give is of the successful perfumer Roja Dove. A man that GQ once referred to as “the finest nose in the world”, I remember meeting Dove once at a press event for a perfume launch in London. He had sparkling sapphire eyes, with hands covered in diamond rings and an Hermes silk scarf around his neck, air-kissing the room as he floated around in a thick cloud of patchouli and ambergris.

I hadn’t done my homework on who he was, so I googled him under the table and was surprised to learn from his Wikipedia page that his real name wasn’t Roja Dove at all, but Roger Bird—a man from Sussex who had fashioned himself into something… else. A bird to a dove, a pigeon to a peacock. I remember thinking that Dove himself was a living metaphor for fragrance: Like masking an unremarkable name with an exotic one, perfume can be transfigurative, imparting on the wearer an illusion that even an expensive outfit can’t compete with.

Which brings me to T.T, the Kyoto-based label formerly known as Taiga Takahashi which is popular for its vintage-inspired menswear, and which makes up more of my wardrobe than any other label. I have a washi knit sweater, a horsehide leather jacket, some grey wool trousers that drape better than any other pair I’ve tried on in my life, a couple of shirts, some corduroys, a mud-dyed hoodie, and a new pair of shorts that are still sitting in their box near the wardrobe waiting for summer to hit.

So yes, high hopes from me. This April, the brand released its first fragrance in partnership with French perfume studio Arpa; titled Senko no Ku, it is exclusive to the brand’s zen-like store in Kyoto (or can be bought online), and is an eye-watering ¥58,300 (approx £275, or just shy of $400).

Arpa’s founder is Barnabé Fillion (his real name), who is the nose behind Aesop’s popular range of fragrances. Senko no Ku literally translates to “flash of void”, and is supposedly about the play between light and dark and is inspired by kodo, which is the zen practice of “listening to scent” through silence and meditation. (As well as a flash of light, senko in Japanese can also mean incense).

It launched with an exhibition inside a Buddhist temple called Ryosokuin, a beautiful setting in Kyoto which Fillion decorated with scented panelled sculptures made from aluminium, acrylic and fabric that played with the light and the breeze. The website copy calls it “a lingering resonance rather than a fixed form. A quiet flare. A capsule of erased memories.” What did I say at the beginning of this piece?

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As well as being a big T.T guy, I’m also a secret fragrance fanatic. In my former days as an editor at Mr Porter, part of my job was to oversee our grooming and self-care content, and I took advantage of the free samples so much that my desk was like an apothecary of expensive smells that I would terrorise the rest of the editorial team. Nowadays, beyond occasional visits to Nose Shop (a niche fragrance store in Japan that you should absolutely visit if you get chance), I seldom buy new fragrances.

Over the years, however, I’ve accumulated a few niche favourites, and on any given day I will likely be wearing one of these five:

• The Decay of the Angel by Imprint Editions (formerly Timothy Han), inspired by the Yukio Mishima novel of the same name. What did I tell you? Pretentious beyond parody. But this smells mysterious and sexy—two qualities I don’t otherwise project—so I’m into it.

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Also, a preview of what’s coming up over the next couple of weeks:
- The verdict on T.T’s first fragrance
- Where to buy excellent shirts for the summer
- An interview with the team behind Omar Afridi

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**

Last week, a user called Leftypoint posted a long takedown of the San Francisco-based brand Evan Kinori on the Throwing Fits subreddit. The 2,000 word screed, which sparked some disparaging (but kind of hilarious) memes, took aim at the mythology around Kinori’s clothes more than the clothes themselves, which can be summed up as brown and expensive. They’re also flattering and well-made, with a focus on natural fabrics and a transparent supply chain that includes working with craftspeople in Japan on dyeing and textiles. Pretty inoffensive, as brands go.

The author argued, quite eloquently but ultimately with too much grudge to take seriously, that in the decade since its inception, Evan Kinori transformed from an honest menswear pioneer into something preachy and hypocritical. “What began as a thoughtful argument for slower, more meaningful clothing,” they scolded, “slowly devolved into a system of narratives that now asks every garment to carry a philosophical burden.”

According to the disgruntled commentator, whom it turns out has been a dedicated Evan Kinori hate-poster for a while, the brand went from wabi sabi aesthetic and appreciation for natural materials into a sneering, sinister example of a brand that peddles a moral manifesto; “I wear these slow, thoughtful clothes because I am better than you,” type of thing.

There is no real evidence of any of this beyond the author projecting some insecurity, but I think unintentionally raises a more interesting point: What happens when a brand becomes a meme? When a designer becomes so easy to satirise, does that mean it has reached peak cultural relevancy, or that it’s just… predictable? And when a small independent brand scales it business, is it always at the expense of authenticity? (Sidenote: Rick Owens and Donatella Versace are the only fashion designers to have their own Know Your Meme pages, which feels like a badge of honour.)

Maybe it’s proof that Kinori has created such a strong design language that so it’s easy to recognise and thus easy to make fun of. But then, the designer is far from the most extreme example of the sphere of brown and expensive clothes that he operates in. Leftypoint should meet the Chinese: you imagine a yarn-dyed shirt from Aviva Jifei Xue or drawstring trousers from Ziggy Chen would bring on a hernia. Even so, it’s easy to inadvertently dress as a potion seller when wearing brands in this artisanal pocket of menswear, earthy and drapey as they are.

To his credit, Kinori has managed to package this earthy drapiness into something much more palatable through his slouchy, subtly contemporary silhouettes. They are wearable and thus sellable: in 2020 the New York Times reported that Kinori’s business brings in $500,000 of gross annual revenue, which, considering the fanfare around the brand, we can assume will have increased considerably in six years since.

Brands in this artisanal sphere of fashion, whether they are Japanese or not, have readily adopted the language of Japanese fabric development. Every country dyes their textiles, but the Japanese way of doing it holds particular sway in menswear (see Thing, Japan meme).

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After being spoiled by Tokyo, I didn’t expect to be impressed by Seoul’s shopping scene, but it blew me away. The stores were often larger and more stimulating, the vintage prices were more reasonable, and the staff were friendly. Over three trips in the past six months, I diligently did the rounds of all the stores I’d heard about from friends and contacts who were familiar with Seoul, and found places that curated the best menswear, interesting vintage, or atmospheres you couldn’t reach in other places.

Below is the result: a guide to 12 stores worth visiting in Seoul, including South Korea’s most obsessive vintage Prada collector, one of the best independent menswear stores in Asia, and an avant-garde tearoom that served me a chocolate shoe. Plus, a google maps link with over 20 recommendations across the city. Even if you’re not planning to be in Seoul anytime soon, the guide intends to serve as a gateway to brilliant brands.

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Wimpy shopping guides are compiled from on-the-ground research and local recommendations. To read this one and receive access to future guides as well as the archive, upgrade to a paid subscription.

Coming soon: Where to shop for clothes in Kyoto

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Which is all to say that there’s plenty of newness coming to Wimpy, including interviews with some designers that I’m gatekeeping for now, a guide to shopping Seoul’s deepest gems, and a cross-section of the new menswear iceberg.

Before that, however, settle in for this interview (the first ever!) with Shinji Watanabe, the clever and unusual designer behind ISSUETHINGS. After circling him for the past few seasons, I pulled the trigger and visited him in his showroom a few weeks ago for a chat.

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——

“Guys are all dressing like NPCs,” a friend told me recently. His point was that with so many palatable menswear brands around, and a flattening of taste thanks to the internet, personal style has become numb, pre-determined and devoid of authenticity. The only thing worse than being dressed by your mother is being dressed by a Substack post armed to the teeth with affiliate links.

A few seasons ago, I came across a brand that I think may signal a post-NPC menswear world, and have been curious to learn more. Founded by Shinji Watanabe in 2020, Issue Things is one of the more unusual brands in the menswear space right now. It’s popping up with increasing frequency on the racks at some of the coolest stores in Asia (the buyers always get there first), but even so it remains under-the-radar, and until now Watanabe has never done any press.

Issue Things’s obscurity is partly because the button-up shirts and trousers it puts out are relatively unremarkable at a glance. You might even call some of them boring, but this is an NPC bait-and-switch: a deception of something fascinating going on under the surface. Instead, Issue Things provides a counterpoint to the product-obsessed, fabric-focused era of menswear we’re experiencing at the moment.

In practice, this means perfectly finished shirt collars layered with haphazard cuts, or trousers whose inner linings peek through the side seams. These details are not the point of the garment, but subtle inflections that hint at their design. It echoes the deconstructionist approach proposed by Martin Margiela—turning a garment in on itself and referencing its infrastructure—but reworked for the Auralee generation. They’re “wait a minute…” clothes that telegraph an interest in fashion that goes beyond a flattering silhouette or a tactile fabric.

Watanabe is able to achieve this perspective because he is a fashion outsider. Or, at least, he perceives himself to be.

I meet the designer on a rainy spring weekend at his showroom, which is packed to the gills with stylishly understated Tokyoites putting in personal orders. A lean 35-year-old with a studious intensity and an irrepressible smile, Watanabe considers himself a late bloomer. He studied graphic design at Tama Art University—the alma mater of Issey Miyake and Mihara Yasuhiro—before getting a job at an advertising agency, but the salaryman experience wasn’t what he’d chalked it up to be, and a quarter-life crisis hit. “After working in an office for about three years, I realised my life wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be,” he said. Despite having no experience in fashion, he quit his job and enrolled in a one-year course at Bunka Fashion College.

In the near-decade since, he has become obsessed with learning how clothes are made, and feels like he’s playing catchup to his peers. “The more I study clothes, the more I feel that making outlandish clothes isn’t really engaging with the history of clothing,” he said. “What I’m doing right now is, to put it simply, too much like Margiela, and too much rooted in deconstruction. So I feel like I’m at a stage where I have to redefine what is beautiful.”

The Issue Things process goes like this: first, Watanabe will try to make a garment sincerely, and then closely observe any errors or unexpected developments in the process. “For example, the star patch has shrunk,” he says, picking up a sweater with a deformed star sewn onto the front. “We wanted to make it look normal but an error occurred during the manufacturing process where only the wool shrunk. When something unexpected happens, we want to be a brand that can react to it.” Things like this—issues, as Watanabe thinks of them—happen a lot. “We look at everything involved in manufacturing equally, and hopefully we can get inspiration from it to create something new.”

Though the Margiela influence is clear, Watanabe’s biggest inspiration comes from Christopher Nemeth, the late British designer who set up his business in Tokyo in the mid-80s. Watanabe would visit the Nemeth store when he was still in high school. “What really struck me about him was that he was making clothes from garbage. Discarded postman bags, Letter Pack bags, burlap sacks,” he said. “I thought it was amazing how he could transform things that other people don’t see much value in into something incredibly valuable through the power of his design.” Watanabe’s collection of Nemeth comprises over thirty pieces, many of them not in his size. “I buy them because I want to get closer to his philosophy,” he said.

I tell Watanabe that what I find so interesting about Issue Things is that the clothes look like normcore, but are actually quite weird: not challenging to look at, per se, but difficult to box up. This intangibility, he explains, comes from his love for Harajuku fashion culture. “Japanese people have a history of a culture where all sorts of clothes were mixed together.” American vintage might be worn with Vivienne Westwood, or blended with cyberpunk with a lolita twist. “There was a generation that treated [those aesthetics] as equals, and I’ve definitely been influenced by that too,” he said.

Issue Things is not necessarily a fully-formed fashion brand, but that’s perhaps the point: it remains rooted in process. “We may not have been able to paint a big picture of the future yet, but I think that’s the next step,” said Watanabe, his thoughtful eyes sparkling behind his thick black spectacles. “And I would be happy if, when we get to end of those steps, we’ll be able to see further than before.”

What do pumped-up gym bros, looksmaxxers, biohackers and the 0.01% have in common? They’ve all started showing up at fashion week.

This season was dominated by various forms of extreme, sometimes bleak expressions of masculinity. Absurdly muscular guys bulged out of glossy black T-shirts at Gucci, Tom Ford showed Patrick Bateman clones in clear raincoats, and biceps popped out of the sleeveless tailoring at Calvin Klein. Most striking was the casting: Braden Peters (the looksmaxxing streamer known as Clavicular) and Bryan Johnson (the tech bro who wants to live forever) made their modelling debuts at Elena Velez and Matieres Fecales. Clavicular wore a white shirt that looked as though it had been drenched in slime, while Johnson was in a tight grey knit that made him look like a spaceship lieutenant. Mark Zuckerberg, once considered a terminal nerd, was around too: front row at Prada, amid talks of a Meta AI glasses collaboration.

I wrote about it all for Vogue Business this week, and interviewed academics, designers, analysts and fashion experts to try to examine—sincerely—why this surge of behaviour had spilled over from fringe internet culture onto the runway. We called it “hypermasculinity”, which a lot of people in the comments took issue with, but I don’t know we have a better word to sum up the display of aesthetics we saw this season. Engineered masculinity? It certainly feels male: a narcissistic belief that the body is a system to be engineered for longevity, beauty or power. After thinking it over, I landed on android chic: an age of impending transhumanism when male bodies are obsessively enhanced by peptides, supplements, surgery and steroids. Whether it’s chic or not is up for debate, but argue amongst yourselves.

Android chic was clearest at Gucci, newly inherited by Demna. The brawny men in the show almost looked like AI and walked with a mecha-like swagger, their pecs and abs straining against shiny T-shirts. It was an exaggeration of the steroid-drenched spornosexual bodies now normalised on social media. Even so, it wasn’t a particularly groundbreaking or beautiful collection, and this season’s archetypes of sexpot Italians, jerk rappers and roadmen felt too true to real life to be properly interesting.

But Gucci was just the most visible sign of a deeper shift that came through in the casting of Bryan Johnson and Clavicular as runway models. Under the lights, their pale and waxy faces appeared as machines. It’s prescient that both Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion—anime that explore these themes—are both currently happening here in Tokyo. Anrealage even put Ghost in the Shell on the runway.

Looksmaxxing—once a fringe school of thought that grew in the petri dish of incel forums—was also a big talking point this season. After Clavicular walked for Elena Velez, fashion watch party organiser and influencer Lyas asked male models at Burberry what they thought of looksmaxxing, and this weekend the New Yorker ran a story about the language that surrounds it.

On one hand, I am aware of how hard it is to be immune to all of it. I work out, I moisturise, I drink Savas and sometimes take creatine. Every couple of months I get acupuncture on my face (hit me up if you want a connect with my guy). I too want to be hot and successful and live a long and healthy life! Banal, natural desires! The danger happens when our appetite for these normal things goes unchecked, and is enabled and encouraged by culture and technology.

The idea that you can rank a person with by their bone structure reminds me of that episode of Dexter’s lab where Dexter gives himself super-laser eye surgery. He can see everyone in ultrahigh definition—every pore, every flaw—but the cost is that his family are rendered nauseatingly ugly and he goes insane. Moving through the world conscious of everyone else’s canthal tilt and maxilla metrics is no life, like judging a person’s worth of character by their follower count.

There’s an interesting duality at play with Bryan Johnson and Clavicular. The former is on a mission to live forever, while the latter, a so-called incelebrity who takes crystal meth to stay lean, reads as semi-suicidal—a Ballardian car crash hoping for a beautiful death. Between them both is a dichotomy of self-love and self-hatred: one side wants to prolong its life for as long as possible through ultimate wellness, and the other to smash itself into oblivion in the pursuit of beauty.

What unites the two in their Sisyphean “ascension” of cheating death and ugliness is an undeniable void. Johnson, who is a former Mormon, seems cheery enough, but he lives the life of a man who has already donated his body to science. He will never again experience the singular joy of having a cigarette with a friend outside a party, or, I don’t know, eating parfait. His physical body is fully optimised but his soul has been laid to rest. Perhaps the human race will benefit from Johnson’s project, and aid medical science in finding cures to age-related disease. The advantage of Braden Peters’ existence is less clear. In both cases, the pleasureless price of their work is a necessary comfort that allows us to pity rather than envy them. One must imagine Clavicular unhappy.

The upshot of all of this is that there’s a huge opportunity in menswear right now for clothes that speak to a wider variety of bodies and identities. It’s one of the reasons many guys—and many of you reading Wimpy—are more interested in shopping from disruptive designers or craft-focused brands than they are in what the big luxury players are putting out. It’s clothing that is beautiful, on or off the body. Against that, those apocalyptic spectres melt away.

MORE WIMPY:

An interview with 2026 LVMH shortlist designer Tíscar Espadas

The Real Clothes Apocalypse

Welcome to the Age of Honest Menswear

What I do know is that Kawakubo has a favourite store. It’s the place that she keeps the closest eye on what is selling, who the staff are, and the curation of her personal favourite brands.

Unlike Dover Street Market—the department store headed up by her husband Adrian Joffe—this particular outpost is a more concentrated vision and curation of the Comme universe, and provides a window into the side of fashion that Kawakubo herself appreciates. Best of all, it’s where select pieces of the Comme archive (which is reportedly kept in a giant warehouse somewhere north of Tokyo) are brought out of hibernation.

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The Trading Museum on the second floor of the Gyre building in Omotesando is an open-plan space that looks like most other Comme stores at first glance. The buy, however, is made up of Kawakubo’s own favourite brands, including Walter van Beirendonck, Christopher Nemeth, Shushu Tong and Elena Dawson. There are exclusive pieces that aren’t stocked in DSM, Comme reproductions from previous seasons, and consistent space devoted to Kawakubo’s beloved collaboration with the Beatles. And then there’s the archive section.

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Thank you for reading Wimpy. Below the paywall you’ll find more details about the archive, plus five fashion stores I recommend to close friends visiting Japan. A paid subscription also gets you access to interviews with leading and underground independent designers, menswear commentary, and more in-depth store guides that you won’t read elsewhere.

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Five brands, five hours!

After a particularly punishing schedule during Paris Fashion Week this season, I had a total of around five hours to play with that did not involve schlepping around the city to review runway shows. There was a lot that I wanted to see that I missed, but I managed to carve out enough space to keep Wimpy readers well fed.

Because time was limited, I laser-focused on people I feel are pushing the envelope right now, but remain slept on or who I expect more from in the future. There are so many brilliant (and brilliantly palatable) clothes in menswear right now, and so I went hunting for things that are challenging the norm in some way. Things with bite! Things you can pick from a hanger and say: only this brand could make that. A lot of the good stuff fits into the category of what Throwing Fits co-host James Harris cleverly coined as Earthy Tone Don Drapey Flow, but with a more exciting twist. Natural fabrics, supernatural cuts.

Which brings us to those few short hours in Paris this season, spent with five designers from around the world, each doing something distinctly special.

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Hello from somewhere high up in the air, where I’m flying back to Tokyo after a couple of weeks in Europe. During the Paris leg of the trip I banked 16 collection reviews overall during fashion week, which translates to a pretty hardcore season that left me with little time to check in. I’ve learned that it is possible to write four runway reviews in one day, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

My work schedule kept me away from the showrooms for the most part, but I saw some really great stuff that will provide some nourishment for Wimpy readers over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for a few independent designer interviews. Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a rundown on what my job actually looks like during fashion week.

The main reason I go to Paris is to review the collections. What I get to review changes each season depending on what my editor assigns to me; I cover a lot of the Japanese designers, but many other brands too. I’m going to get sincere here, but I love writing runway reviews, and I’d like to tell you how it works.

The first step is that I am assigned a particular show by my editor. This is decided weeks in advance. I then arrange my tickets through the PR, go to see the show, and usually interview the designer backstage (sometimes before, sometimes after) to help make sense of it all. When this is done I must write my review as soon as is feasibly possible. Sometimes when there are shows throughout the day I might not get chance to do so until I get home in the evening. Shows can run as late as 10pm, and if you have three reviews to write, you know you’ll be up until the early hours. The general rule is that you file before you sleep, however long it takes.

This is equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. My brain usually runs on anxiety, but there is no time to second guess yourself at fashion week, and so for once I am free. I see the show that a designer has put on, give it my full attention for the ten minutes the clothes come down the runway, and then run it through the mill of my mind to analyse it in a few hundred words… and then it’s gone! It’s intense; a forced flow state.

So how does a review actually work? The main thing I’ll look at, unsurprisingly, is the clothes: How do they move? How have they been made? What would they look like in a real life context, and what would they say about the person who wears them? Do they feel relevant, connected with the world somehow? All the while, I’m also making mental notes of everything else I can see and hear and feel. Who’s in the audience? What music is playing? What’s the mood in the room, and does it shift as the show goes on? What makes or breaks it is all of these things together, shaken up in a juju bag, which is why it’s so difficult to define a “good” or “bad” fashion show.

I also think decent fashion criticism has very little to do with personal taste. You are not there to tell people whether or not you like it, but to translate it into language the audience (which includes fans, haters, and the designers themselves) can understand, and sometimes hopefully grow from. It’s a service.

WHO’S WINNING IN PARIS?

Menswear has felt very safe in recent seasons but this season you could feel the designers starting to push at those limits. This time, the designers that succeeded were the ones who were able to wrangled their frustrations with the world onto the runway.

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Ciao ragazzi from the last day of Pitti Uomo in Florence, where I feel like I’ve been dipped in butter. As well as eating enough bistecca to ruin the digestive system of a small village (not to mention the best tiramisu of my life at Trattoria Cammillo), I’ve also seen a lot of clothes.

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IS PITTI BACK?!

After the decline of hashtag menswear and the Pitti Peacock fatigue that happened in the 2010s, the general mood at the fair this time was that it felt more exciting than it has done in years. Scott Schuman AKA The Sartorialist summed it up: “I’ve missed the days when I was excited to get to the fortezza and be inspired! This season is the first in a while that everyday offered something special! Welcome back Pitti!”

The week kicked off with the Sebiro Sanpo (Suit Walk), an event that originated in Tokyo where hundreds of people gather to walk around the streets dressed to the nines. I was on the ground chatting to attendees, and frankly the vibes were so positive that it felt like evil was being healed from the humanity. Pitch for world peace: turn the G20 summit into a Sebiro Sanpo.

I found dressing for Pitti much more intimidating than dressing for fashion week in Paris or Tokyo, because it’s cliquey in a way that is so visible—you’re either a Pitti Peacock or you’re not. People make an insane amount of effort that borders on costume (mostly in a good way!) and that can be scary. But, crucially, the vibe at Pitti is not an elitist fashion vibe—it’s a nerdy vibe! Everyone’s just there to dress up, take a billion photos, and geek out about each other’s clothes. The most harmless of harmless fun. I managed to get through it mostly in my horse leather jacket from T.T, and this insane whale zip-up shawl collar sweater that I found at Suntrap in Koenji.

What I was really there for were the trio of runway shows by Hed Mayner, Shinya Kozuka, and Soshi Otsuki.

It was both Shinya and Soshi’s first time showing outside of Tokyo, which is a big deal. Almost every designer I speak to in Japan says that they want to show abroad; I hear it so often that I think yeah, sure, I’ll believe it when I see it. But then boom, it happens. Soshi and Shinya are part of the next generation of Japanese designers that, though totally different from each other, are defining a new chapter of menswear. It’s hard to overstate how hard they have worked for moments like this, and it was incredibly moving to see them both get their flowers in Florence.

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Some extra thoughts on them all:

SHINYA KOZUKA

Shinya Kozuka covered the Fortezza da Basso in a blanket of fake snow, and showed clothes inspired by his recurring motifs of winter and the moon. He’d been inspired by the solitary gloves he sometimes sees during his nighttime walks around Tokyo. Unrequited gloves! And so there were gloves hanging out of knitted aprons, or needle-punched onto wool coats. One coat had 1,300 buttons and took a week to make.

In the past I’ve sometimes found his collections a little chaotic, but this was his most cohesive yet. Shinya’s work is always very sensitive and romantic; he’s a painter, really, as much as he is a designer, which is why his clothes are often covered in illustrations. The baggy and feminine silhouettes, the skirt-like pants, the soft-looking workwear… If you want an idea of how sensitive and fashionable Gen Z men are dressing on the streets of Tokyo right now, this is it.

HED MAYNER

I found Hed’s approach to tailoring fascinating; he really challenges the way we approach dressing the body, designing gestures into clothing—e.g. flipping the head of the sleeve so that it creates a shrug). He’s pushing at the edge of what’s possible with form, and his clothes look intelligent and deliciously alien. Perhaps because of that, I came away from it wondering who would wear some of these pieces. Maybe there’s someone out there who will enjoy wearing a pleated swamp-green suede tunic and slim sequinned trousers, but I can’t picture them. You can raise some interesting questions with a collection but… ya gotta sell stuff too.

SOSHI OTSUKI

Mindbendingly elegant!! Up there as one of the most era-defining collections I’ve ever seen. Soshi’s tailoring is an expression of the complicated beauty that exists in the Japanese desire to dress in Western clothing. Nobody thus far has explored the nuances of this in the way that Soshi has, which is why his salaryman suits look so fresh. This time was his best yet, and was full of colour and texture (Forest green diagonal corduroy! Orange cable knits! Pink shirts!) Collabs included sashiko suiting with Proleta Re Art and Asics zip-ups (sneaker link-up also on the way).

Soshi wasn’t speaking to press afterwards, but I managed to get the exclusive interview with him after the show. Some detail that didn’t make it into the Vogue Runway review:

The soundtrack was from Takeshi Kitano’s 2000 film Brother, composed by Joe Hisaishi—the guy who does all the incredible Studio Ghibli music. “I felt a strong affinity with the film, and this story of a Japanese yakuza who goes to America and survives through violence despite not being able to speak the language,” he told me. Soshi has been spending more and more time in Europe and New York since he won the LVMH Prize, and is having to get used to expressing himself.

Soshi also worked with a stylist for the first time this season (he used to style his collections by himself), which he says helped him unlock a new level of creativity. “The styling was a big factor this time. I was able to incorporate the opinions of people who aren’t accustomed to Japanese salaryman culture,” he said.

The week before the show, he told me that he was approaching this show at Pitti with the mindset that this one show could change his life. Mission accomplished.

RANDOM APERITIVO CHAT

• Whatever happened to date and address-core? 1017Alyx9SM and Raf Simons’s 209w39nyc Calvin Klein was really a whole thing that journalists and PRs used to have to painstakingly type out in the 2010s. It’s the kind of contrarian shit that Elon Musk names his kids. Will it make a comeback? Considering people can’t stop posting about what they looked like in 2016, maybe.

• Choppelgangers AKA doppelgängers where one is more unattractive/chopped than the other. Speaking of, I visited Martelli while in Florence to try on some of their excellente leather gloves, and the shop lady told me I looked like a young Michael J. Fox. My biggest fear: that the choppelganger is me.

• Food is better in Italy than in Japan. Not a joke, just a fact! The taste highs are more intense in Italy, and your palate is assaulted with a panache of flavour and texture that Japan can’t compete with. If Japanese food is ritalin, Italian cuisine is cocaine. The silver lining is that if I lived in Italy I would get gout, so I’m grateful that it’s mostly zaru soba on the menu rather than truffle pasta.

• Florence is a great place to stock up on cosmetics. While there I picked up the rose water and the buttery Crema al Polline from Santa Maria Novella, and in the couple of days I’ve been using it my face feels mochi-level soft. I also stumbled upon independent perfumers Profumoir while walking around the street. The Florentine brand makes scents from a single ingredient, the simplicity of which I think is a great antidote to the terminally basic Le Labo of it all (because who wants to smell like everyone else?!). So now I smell like Opium, or Oppio, which I would describe as dark, churchy, and kind of medicinal in a sexy way. As an intensely posh girl that I went to university with used to say: “HD plus! Hot and dangerous!”

Japanese often borrows from English to make up new words. One of my favourite examples of this is the expression ‘NG’, which stands for ‘Not Good’ and is the linguistic equivalent of the general prohibition sign, used to point out bad behaviour. So instead of ‘No Photography’, you might see ‘Photography NG’.

So it is with ‘Real Clothes’ (リアルクローズ), the catch-all term that Japan invented to describe everyday, wearable clothing, distinct from the outwardly creative, avant-garde garments you might see on the runway. Uniqlo and COS on one side of the spectrum, Comme des Garçons and Craig Green on the other.

In recent seasons, however, Real Clothes and runway clothes have become increasingly blurred. As hype shifted away from streetwear towards quiet luxury over the past decade, labels like The Row and Lemaire moved into the spotlight. When that became mainstream, menswear heads turned their attention to brands like Auralee, Comoli, ssstein and A.Presse, AKA the Four Horsemen of new Japanese minimalism. Also see Ancellm and the aptly named Niceness, not to mention the huge wave of minimal brands that have come out of Scandinavia in the last ten years.

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These brands are unimpeachably tasteful, and set themselves apart largely by their fabric development, which is fastidious. In my experience, they mostly look great when you try them on, and are very easy to style (which makes them easy to sell). There’s a rising sentiment, however, that everything is beginning to blend into an amorphous mass of… expensive blandness. BoF called it ‘menswear’s sameness epidemic’. In the worst cases, these clothes become a stand-in for taste and personality, all while using craft as a crutch. NG!

Declaring that out loud? Warfare. Sticking his head above the parapet last month, personal stylist Turner Allen made a reel railing against the “fashion bro obsession” with minimalist brands: “It often feels like the status-signalling is doing the heavy lifting, not necessarily the design or innovation,” he said, adding that these simple brands are “meant to signify superior taste…not individuality, but correctness”. In other words, the American Psycho business card scene but with $800 sweaters.

Some guys were pressed by Allen’s take. A.Pressed. “[These brands] custom develop their own fabrics in small batches often at the yarn/fibre level. Not to mention their attention to patterning, drape, construction or hardware which is levels beyond anything at Uniqlo. Since when is that basic?” read one comment. For others it resonated: “I fully agree that it gives wealthy NPC,” read another.

(Side-note: Chris over at Duchump was one of the first to address the furore in his recent post ‘Basic?’, which digs into the charm of these brands at a personal level.)

Sure, menswear it not at its most visually arresting right now. (Though honestly, there’s plenty of stuff from the aforementioned brands that is far from minimal). But what many people missed with Allen’s take is that it wasn’t targeting the brands themselves, but the icky culture surrounding them.

Can men make discerning clothing decisions for themselves, or do they need a co-sign from a TikTok influencer or Substack shopping writer first? As more guys have become interested in fashion in recent years, they’ve looked for ways to participate in a way that feels correct and acceptable, and ‘real clothes’ brands allow that, no questions asked. The problem arises when untamed fashion bro hype meets brands that intended to sidestep that hype entirely.

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Auralee is a blank canvas of a brand. The mens and womenswear label, which was founded by Ryota Iwai, was created with the idea that it would be unbound by nation or theme, and has no overarching message beyond putting beautiful, well-made clothes into the world. Simple. Or is it?

In the decade since it was founded, Auralee has become a favourite among menswear insiders for its gaspingly good fabrics and boldly tasteful colours. The man behind it, however, has remained relatively mysterious.

Ahead of our conversation, I am told by various sources that Iwai is a phlegmatic and awkward interview, often deflecting questions with a shrug or an “I don’t know”. “It’s because he has no interest in himself,” says Kanae Arai, his wife and high school sweetheart with whom he runs the company (she heads up marketing and PR). He cringes at personality quizzes, she says, and can’t understand the desire for introspection. “He’s always been the same,” she smiles, recalling their college days together. “At that age, boys try to act cool and show off to girls, but he was completely different. He’s a little clumsy [she uses the Japanese word ochokochoi], and he’s kind. He’s kind to all kinds of people.”

The Iwai I find when I visit him at his office HQ in Minami-Aoyama at lunchtime during one of Tokyo’s roastingly hot August days is indeed kind, and only a little awkward. He welcomes me with a flurry of bowing and leads me to a small table at the far end of the brand’s vast showroom, which is bright, beige and filled with soft-looking samples that span parakeet green to butter yellow among other shades of reds, blues and beiges, in fabrics like baby alpaca and bluefaced wool.

Rake-like and with messy black hair, Iwai has curious, sparkly eyes that light up when he smiles, which is often. He dresses casually in well-worn vintage T-shirts and rumpled cotton trousers, with a Cartier Baignoire on his left wrist and a thin golden rope chain on his right. Despite being fashion’s minimalist du jour, Iwai says he’s one of the messiest people in his office. “Papers everywhere!” he laughs.

Each season, to inform his collections, Iwai finds sunbeams of inspiration in the mire of daily life: the gathering of friends in a city park; the meditative transition of winter unfolding into spring; the moments after work when one’s time becomes one’s own. He translates this feeling into perennially easy pieces that have won him fans the world over, who enjoy his oversized button-up shirts and softly-soft tailoring for how approachable and effortless it is to wear. At Auralee’s runway show in Paris in June, the brand showed a collection inspired by the lightness of spring that made even leather jackets look breezy. Attended by the great and good of the menswear industry, in the past few seasons it has become one of the schedule’s coolest tickets.

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He is popular among his staff, and is known for rolling his sleeves up and being part of the team. “When we’re all packing up the collection in Paris, he’ll be there doing it too,” a longtime staffer tells me. In a recent team picture shared to Instagram stories, the Auralee employees (which total around 20, including those working in the flagship store in Tokyo), gather around the obliterated pink of a watermelon—part of a seasonal tradition of suikawari, or blindfolded watermelon smashing, which the team do together when they return to Tokyo after putting on their runway shows in Paris.

The brand’s name comes from the American folk song ‘Aura Lee’ (later used as the basis for Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’), which means ‘Land of Light’. It is a warm and sentimental song that brings to mind exactly the kind of vibe that Auralee channels. “At first, I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the way it sounded, which somehow stuck in my mind. I later learned the meaning of the words, and it felt right,” says a passage from Iwai on the brand’s website. “I felt like morning light suited my collection.”

Despite this proclivity for the early hours, Iwai is a nightowl, and will often work past 9pm after the rest of the office has gone home. To switch off, he’ll head to the sento (public bath), sometimes up to six days a week. Sweating it all out in the sauna, thoughts about work will float around in his mind. “Then when it gets hot enough I just zone out,” he says. (Iwai achieved his dream of a bathing-themed collection in collaboration with Copenhagen home textile brand Tekla Fabrics last year, which was photographed in hot springs in rural Japan and featured duvet coats and towels.)

Born in Kobe, a port city on Osaka Bay in the centre of Japan’s main island, Iwai’s reality was bordered by the rising mountains on one side and the sparkling sea on the other. “It was a perfect place, neither rural or urban,” he says. Growing up with an abundance of second-hand clothing stores in walking distance, Iwai nurtured a dream that he would one day work in one, or even open his own. Beginning in his third year of high school, he got a part-time job at one, and stayed there for about four years. “It wasn’t a particularly busy store, so I really felt how difficult it was to sell a single item,” he said. “It wasn’t just the typical vintage stuff, but a variety of second-hand clothing from around Seattle, on the West Coast.”

After working at the vintage store, he went to the nearby city of Osaka to study business administration at Kinki University. As he and Arai began to build a life together, she encouraged Iwai to start his own thing. “At first, I said I just wanted to work in a clothing store, but [Kanae] said that if I love clothes so much, I should try making them myself,” he says.

He moved to Tokyo, attending a night course at Bunka Fashion College and taking part time jobs during the day. In his first year he worked in the editorial department at So-En, Bunka’s in-house fashion magazine, and then landed a job at Norikoike, a now-defunct brand focused on knitwear and fabric production. Slowly, he became more familiar with the process of running a fashion business, and the seed for Auralee grew in his mind all the while before finally becoming a reality in 2015. “I realized that what I could do was create textures, making fabric from the very beginning. What I’m passionate about is creating materials,” he says. Iwai travelled to Mongolia for cashmere and camel hair, and to New Zealand for wool. The result is clothes that are simple to look at, but borderline orgasmic to touch.

He also made a conscious decision to focus on Japan-made product. “When I launched the brand, I wasn’t even thinking about having a store; I saw it as a wholesale business where I’d sell my products to high-quality stores,” he says. “So when I wondered how I could differentiate myself, I thought of clothes hanging on a hanger. I wanted people to look at the sleeves and think, ‘Oh, now there are some nice clothes with a special vibe.’ My desire to use truly high-quality materials was something I had in mind from the beginning.” The brand is also untied to any place or time. “It’s not American, it’s not European, and it’s not Japanese,” he explains. “I had an image of doing something [with Auralee] that didn’t really identify with a specific era or nationality.”

It has worked—the brand says it has increased revenue by 120% every year for the past few years. Fashionable people from Amsterdam to New York wear it; Iwai will sometimes spot passersby in Tokyo or Paris in his designs, and occasionally he is recognised in the street. “I’m happy, but I didn’t expect it to turn out like this, so there’s a lot of pressure,” he says. “I feel that there are more and more expectations every year.”

Iwai also sees the responsibility he has to Japan’s factories: “There are fewer and fewer things that can be made in Japan [because of the] aging workforce, so I feel like I have a mission for that, to make the right products.”

I look around again at the spectrum of samples surrounding us. Does he have a favourite colour? “That’s difficult, because I use so many colors…” he says, pausing to think. “But it’s not black or anything like that. I like comfortable colors.” What’s a comfortable color? “The one I tend to use most is that light yellow.” He gestures to a soft cotton jacket on the rack: it’s a warm shade of dawn light.

As our conversation comes to its end, Iwai excuses himself to take another meeting at the opposite end of the room. It’s another busy, back-to-back day—I wonder how he manages to keep such serenity in the clothing, with the increasing demands of being a business leader, not to mention a lodestar that the emerging generation of Japanese designers look up to. No doubt that after he cycles home, he’ll head to the sento to decompress. Steam rises, sweat falls, and all of those thoughts about work fade into the heat. The blank canvas appears once more.

Words: Ashley Ogawa Clarke
Photography: Daisuke Nakashima
Creative & Styling: Jason Rider
Grooming: Narumi Nishihara
Styling Assistant: Saeki Yuzuru
Casting & Production: Good Sport
Local Production: Tae Rang Kim
Executive Producer: Jiacheng Guo
Editor: Meng-Yun Wang

2026 will be a crucial moment for fashion in Japan across both menswear and womenswear: outside of the big names who already show in Paris, a new wave of domestic brands are emerging and poised to go international. A few names have been bubbling under the surface for a while, but now they’re ripe and ready! And hardly anybody outside of Japan knows their names! So here’s a broad-strokes, slightly chaotic primer on what’s happening and who the key players will be in the year ahead.

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Not Tíscar Espadas.

A charming 32-year-old based in Madrid, Espadas is one of the more interesting menswear designers operating outside the blob. Her clothes, which are made in Spain and sell mostly in Japan, look like something out of an old-world storybook; her lookbooks more akin to paintings than photographs. Puff-sleeved pirate shirts with layered curved plackets; pistachio-coloured knickerbockers that balloon out at the knees; sand coloured jackets festooned with buttons, where a flash of red carmine lining folds over the hem… Everything Is Romantic.

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The brand operates on a small independent scale, producing fewer than 500 garments a year. Espadas doesn’t put out collections, but chapters—or ‘capítulo’—once a year. “The collections are not separate. All of them, they are part of one story,” says Espadas over a call from her studio, her Andalusian lilt honeyed with ceceos.

I’m sitting in my apartment in Tokyo on a video call with Espadas and Kevin Kohler looking back at me through the screen. Her partner in life and work, Kohler is a serious and friendly Swiss guy in small rounded spectacles; he was, by coincidence, Espadas’s first customer. Now together for five years, the two work on the brand as a duo. “It’s very beautiful when you speak the same language in the way that, the ideas grow together and so it was very smooth working together,” said Espadas.

Espadas has no idea of how a garment will look before she begins. There is no moodboard or predetermined looks, just intuition. “It is very organic, very slow,” she says of her process. “Sometimes we choose the fabric and it changes the design. It’s like a tree—it starts to open different branches.” The result is a unique cast of characters that appear across each chapter. “There are many things that go into one character, whether it’s irony, sarcasm, or playfulness,” explains Kohler. A lot of people mistake their work for being inspired by historical garments: “Our main inspiration is not coming from medieval or Renaissance. It’s more [about] the things that we like,” he explains.

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This could be anything from a Juan Gris painting to an August Sander photograph. Espadas references the 1969 Soviet avant-garde film The Colour of Pomegranates as something she often returns to, for its haunting atmosphere and otherworldly costumes. “It feels very beautiful, it’s very poetic,” she says. “[Each chapter] is like a bag that you load with all these references, and people try to put a label on it instead of just seeing what actually is.”

One outfit from Espadas might appear Surrealist, while another looks like a medieval matador or with the monastic silhouette of an otherworldly cardinal. The designer’s goal is to open up the imagination beyond what we might expect. “You can make people feel and you can make people dream with clothing,” she says. “And this is at the end of the day what guides every collection—how someone at the end creates their own look, their own character.”

Crucial to those characters is the hats, which are made from pliable cotton and look akin to Napoleonic bicorns. “When I make my sketches, I always feel they need something when they don’t have a hat,” says Espadas. “Sometimes I even think that maybe I abuse a hat, you know? And maybe without a hat it would be more elegant.” Resistance is futile, however. “When you put the hat, for me, a character appear!” she grins.

Espadas grew up in Ubeda, a rustic, sunny town in Andalusia populated by olive trees and Renaissance churches. Her grandfather was a painter, while her grandmothers were seamstresses, making clothes for the townspeople. “I was always with them, playing, but never thinking that I also wanted to make things. I would say I wanted to be a lawyer, I don’t know why,” she laughs. As she got older she began making costumes for her friends’ theatre performances, and went to IED in Madrid to study fashion.

After graduating she moved to Copenhagen to work for Henrik Vibskov, a Danish designer known for his surreal aesthetic and knack for building his label beyond a fashion brand into something all-encompassing. “To build a world in fashion, you also need people from other places,” says Espadas. “We worked with architects, with graphic designers, people that were not only about clothing, but the universe around it.”

After helping Vibskov, Espadas had the itch to build her own universe. She left Copenhagen after landing the Burberry Scholarship to study an MA at London’s Royal College of Art, and founded her label in 2019 after graduation, before relocating to her current studio in Madrid. Espadas teaches fashion design to supplement her income, while Kohler works in Switzerland in gastronomy. Like the clothes, growth is a slow process, but the future looks good. Last year, she won Spain’s Vogue Fashion Fund, securing a €100,000 grant.

Business is slow but solid. Japan is by far the brand’s most important market, and is where it does 90% of retail sales. A cult following emerged there almost immediately after Espadas made her first collection. “When you become a designer, people always ask you ‘who is your customer’, and I never knew! I always thought clothes is for the one who likes it!” says Espadas, wide-eyed. Seeing the popularity of her clothing in Japan brought a sense of vindication. “It was a relief, because I saw people of many ages buying and wearing the same pieces. It made me more strong and convinced that this is what we do,” she says.

Why does she think it resonates so well across ages and sexes in Japan? “I think the way of wearing clothing there is very different to Europe. They feel comfortable in our shapes,” she says. The exclusivity of each garment also appeals: one shirt may be made in tiny runs of under ten, while a coat could be one-of-one. “There is really an appreciation for the piece, for the story, and for how it is made,” she says.

“Tíscar is the Picasso of the fashion world,” says Takashi Suwahara, who manages the brand’s sales in Japan. “You might think it’s a strange shape, but then when you come out of the fitting room and look in the mirror, there will be a new you standing in front of you.”

My own love for Tíscar’s clothes came in a one-two punch: once when my wife Reina showed me the brand’s lookbook images on Instagram, and next when I hunted them down in person at a few stores in Tokyo. Putting on a couple of her meticulously finished linen shirts and fastening up what felt like a hundred tiny buttons, I felt convincingly princely.

The clothes, in their rare fabrics, unexpected patterns and painterly colours, live up to their photographs both in how they look in the mirror and feel on the skin. “Sometimes I go into shops of brands whose images I love and I am almost sad because the clothes are not good for the price,” she says. “You can create a strong image but also a strong piece.”

What most appeals to me about her work, however, is its irresistible strangeness. There is nothing else like it. “Our industry is very tight and very narrow,” she says. “Our clothes are about finding freedom.”

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Featuring menswear, womenswear and kidswear, the collection is called “A Sense of Togetherness” and is inspired by the 1980s and 90s in Japan. The lookbook was shot (beautifully) by Hanna Tveite Capdevielle, and evokes the iconic family portraits of Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase.

There are kimono-tied suit jackets and relaxed tailored trousers for men, and skirt suits for women. One of the sweaters features a hand-scrawled Pikachu (that’s the one on my wishlist). Best is the children’s wear—the tiny corduroy suits and velvet dresses made me want to have kids just so I could dress them up like little Showa-era salarypeople.

From what I saw at the press preview this morning, which was held at a Japanese-style house in Nakameguro, the clothes read as an affordable distillation of Otsuki’s mainline: prices will range from ¥1,990 (£10) for accessories up to ¥39,990 (£195) for coats and tailoring.

Interestingly, Zara put their stock in Otsuki long before he was announced as an LVMH nominee, and asked him to collaborate after they discovered his clothes in Shibuya’s PARCO department store last year. The move is part of the company’s wider strategy to establish more presence in menswear in Asia; for Otsuki’s part, it will help him reach a wider audience (and provide some welcome capital) at a pivotal time for the designer.

Otsuki will also be showing at Pitti in January, marking the first time he will put on a runway show for international press and buyers outside of Japan. I’ll be covering that when it happens, so stay tuned.

Until then, you can read my full interview with Soshi here.

SOSHIOTSUKI x ZARA will be available online and at select stores around the world from 4th December.

Maybe it’s because I spend my working life looking at all of the new clothes coming into the world and talking to emerging designers, but the idea of wearing one-of-a-kind pieces that have never known the sordid touch of today’s all-powerful fashion machine is… irresistible to me. Even if it does mean I sometimes look in the mirror and realise I’ve dressed like Fagin.

Vintage shopping in Japan is the best in the world. The selection is clean and well-cared for. This is true for everything from the used Comoli and Auralee sweaters on the racks at 2nd Street and Treasure Factory, through to the ancient pieces you’ll find in the stores on this list. And because vintage dealers here are catering to the Japanese market, they often have plenty of options in non-giant sizes.

The downside is that these places are hard to find, unless you know where to look. This guide is the first in what will be a long series on shops in Japan and beyond (I have one from Seoul in the works, and will eventually add London, Paris and others over the course of the next year). It covers stores what vintage nerds refer to as ‘true vintage’ i.e. over 50 years old, and ‘antique’ i.e. over 100 years old, and features a total of ten shops, including two online, that are scattered across Tokyo.

In these places you’ll find sun faded sack jackets, salt and pepper work trousers with sashiko repairing, mourning jewellery, corduroy hunting jackets, oil-stained military tees, Japanese peasant garments and plenty more. Fair warning: many of them are relatively expensive, and a lot of them take some effort to find. Some have hidden areas you need to know about to access, or aren’t even on Google Maps; others sell things that we wouldn’t be able to reproduce or replicate today. Between them all, they sell some of the best vintage in the world. Here we go!

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Trillionaires do not yet exist in real life. (Even as I’m writing this, a red squiggle appears under the word.) But whether or not my spellcheck accepts them, they are coming. This month, Elon Musk’s wealth hit $500bn, making him the first person to get halfway there. But, tale as old as time, even with all those resources, the one thing the hyper-rich cannot buy is style. Jeff Bezos, try as he might to muscle up to the fashion set with his Thom Browne suits and turgid biceps, always sticks out as the man who has paid to be there. Musk, for his part, dresses with all the savoir faire of a Roblox character.

What kind of clothes would an unfathomably wealthy megalomaniac in the future wear if they actually had good taste? In Alien: Earth, the new FX show by Noah Hawley, we’re given an idea. Set in 2120, the world is run not by Prime Ministers and Presidents but by the trillionaire CEOs of five mega-corporations.

Boy Kavalier, one of the five, is a former child prodigy who lands somewhere between an arrogantly intelligent tech bro and a fluffy-haired Caligula. Twenty-five but refusing to grow up, he has cast himself as a Peter Pan figure on a remote tropical island called Neverland, where he sets about curing terminally ill children by transplanting their consciousnesses (or are they AI copies?) into near-indestructible robotic bodies to create his own mini army of Lost Boys. More interesting than all of this, though, is his wardrobe.

Suttirat Anne Larlarb, the Alien: Earth’s costume designer, puts Boy K in relaxed silhouettes in natural fabrics that drift somewhere between artisanal fashion and folkish sleepwear. “One of the things we spoke about was costumes that don’t interfere with his ability to work, play, eat,” said Sam Blenkin, the actor who plays him. “Like kind of pyjama-wear, thinking about somebody who never switches off.” Thus his clothes, which look comfy enough to sleep in but are also full of texture and details, paint him as someone who exists somewhere between dreams and reality, night and day. More than that, though, they show he has nothing to prove. If the newly minted tech bro look of the 2000s, with its lumpy hoodies and jeans, went against the formality and tradition of the business suit, then this is the imagined tier of what might come next, from disruptors who exist much higher up the food chain.

The most notable thing about Boy Kavalier’s outfits is that he doesn’t wear shoes. Going barefoot, like wearing $4,000 white silk trousers from The Row, is something you can only do when you never have to step on the dirty outdoor ground, but float from pristine hotel lobby to private plane like a modern-day Galadriel. As well as being an extension of the pyjama look, the bare feet is how Boy K signals his cosseted and comfortable status. (Mad Men’s Bert Cooper did a similar thing, where he wore socks in his own office and demanded everyone remove their shoes before they entered. As well as being a personality quirk, it was also a power move.)

In a tense negotiation meeting with Yutani (another of the 5 trillionaires and his rival), Boy K sets his bare tootsies on the boardroom table in a show of childish insolence. Chloë Sevigny, in newish movie Bonjour Tristesse, says that “everyone looks vulnerable in socks”, but that isn’t true if you’re properly powerful. Sockless Boy K doesn’t look vulnerable at all. Instead he acts like he owns the place (because he probably does). Yutani, by contast, is a more serious dresser: a white pleated shirt beneath a kasuri-dyed jerkin, pearl earrings and hair that has been coiffed into a sort of ridiculous hat—Elizabethan royalty via Yohji Yamamoto. All weird and unrelatable outfits, sure, but they also look great.

Want to dress like a trillionaire yourself? The clothes on the show are originals or drawn from Larlarb’s own collection, so while you can’t get Boy K’s exact look, you can find similarly strange but captivating clothes. The key is unusual pieces that are difficult to place in any era, in distinctive (often painstakingly made) fabrics and easy silhouettes. Avoid anything too hashtag-menswear and instead go further into the woods, to places like CONTEXT or Mienisi—a couple of stores in Tokyo that deal in the deeply artisanal and will appeal to fabric obsessives.

Boy K’s outfits also reminded me of brands like 11.11/eleven eleven and Tomo Kishida, both of whom do incredible things with handwoven fabrics (I own a couple of 11.11 shirts and am desperate for one of Kishida’s beautiful sakiori denim jackets, but would actually need to be a trillionaire to buy one). Closer to my tax bracket is Nemeth, with its baggy pyjama shirts and extra helpings of buttons.

Where would Yutani shop? Nowhere as predictable as Chanel. I’m betting her wardrobe would include also pieces from obscure natural fabric brands, such as Japan’s Amachi and iai, or Tibet’s Norlha Atelier, with some beautiful handwoven coats from Amy Revier—a single one of which takes weeks to make—thrown in for good measure. No doubt she’d have her gaisho fly in a few bits from Isetan and Lauren Manoogian each season too.

When the trillionaires do take over, their wardrobe choices will be the least of our worries. But I’ll take this as an excuse to wheel out one of my all-time favourite fashion quotes, that came from Vanessa Friedman when she left her post as fashion editor at the Financial Times in 2014. After years spent justifying fashion as a subject worth taking seriously to the people around her (as many of us who write about it for a living often feel we must do), she ended her final column, echoing something Mark Twain once said, with the perfect rebuttal: “Why does fashion matter? The world is not run by naked people.” Until the trillionaires in charge are replaced by nudist robots, that is unlikely to change.

Alien: Earth is available to stream on Disney+ & Hulu

Three affordable things to make you feel like a trillion bucks

Matcha floss from Hirao Sampei

A cosmetics company founded in Japan in 1878, Hirao Sampei makes the best dental floss in the world and recently launched a matcha flavour. It’s currently only available in Japan, but if you’re a paid subscriber and live elsewhere then I’ll happily proxy one for you.

Diamond Floss in Matcha by Hirao Sampei, £15

A fragrance by Timothy Han

Timothy Han’s Decay of the Angel, named after Yukio Mishima’s 1971 novel, is hands down my favourite fragrance of all time. It’s sexy, medicinal, sweet and churchy in that order, and always makes me feel like I’m the best-smelling freak in the room. Han’s new and improved fragrance project, Imprint Editions, launches in autumn, building on his olfactory oeuvre of scents inspired by literature. Hot!

Decay of the Angel by Imprint Editions, available for pre-order, £164

Washi socks by Petty

Made in Nara on an old-fashioned knitting machine from a blend of cotton and washi paper, these rustic-looking ribbed socks have a slightly crunchy handfeel that is super comfortable. Light enough for summer and warm enough for winter, they’re a small but mighty luxury that has become a regular part of my rotation.

Ribbed washi cotton socks by Petty, £14

The next edition of wimpy will be a special guide to shopping true vintage in Tokyo. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox when it lands next week, upgrade to a paid subscription.

That’s because the best menswear now comes from old-fashioned (but mostly young) clothing makers, who in the past decade have popped up with increasing frequency everywhere from Paris to Kyoto to Cleveland. In contrast to the giants who have come under fire for sacrificing quality in the name of profit, these small designers are thriving precisely because they don’t cut corners. What follows here is largely a laundry list of what I’ve come to think of as Honest Menswear.

I recently wrote this story for the WSJ, examining how the menswear look of the moment has evolved into something quite rustic, casual, and easy. It is baggy shirts from Auralee, hobbit shoes from Aurora NYC, earthy hemp pants from Evan Kinori, and wax cloth caps from MAN-TLE. But that’s just the surface. Climb further down the rabbit hole and it becomes clear that we’re in a kind of golden age of small independent menswear designers. As Samer Saliba, a 39-year-old who works in New York and shops from these brands, put it: “I’m drawn to brands that care more about making clothes than selling clothes.”

There are a lot of options to choose from. The coolest men I know, from Tokyo to New York, are not buying their clothes from famous labels, big department stores, or even e-comm sites. They shop at Mouki Mou or Twos in London, or Shop Boswell in Portland, or Ven Space in New York, or Inside My Glass Doors in Osaka or Weekender Shop in Tokyo.

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As a child, Ryunosuke Okazaki would often look out from his house at the famous vermillion torii gate of Itsukushima. Appearing to float above the calm water and shifting with the daylight, the boy became captivated by the shrine. “I felt like I could draw power from it,” he says. “I also saw it as a prayer for peace in Hiroshima.”

Now 30 and living in Tokyo, Okazaki is building a reputation as one of the most unique and unusual fashion designers of his generation. Last year one of his dresses was chosen for the Met’s ‘Sleeping Beauties’ exhibition. This month, at the Victoria & Albert museum in London, he has an exhibition dedicated to his work. He has not yet sold an item of clothing.

At least not in the ready-to-wear sense. Jutting out in great thorns or twisting around the body in sweeping curves, the designer’s wearable sculptures read less like dresses and more like complications of claws and carapaces. When I visited Okazaki at his home this summer, to see his latest collection, his living room was populated with mannequins wearing his creations, like a council of supreme intergalactic beings descended to earth. What would they think about how we’re all getting on?

To fully appreciate Okazaki’s work, it helps to understand his upbringing in Hiroshima. In the decades since it was hit by an American atomic bomb that razed the city to the ground and blighted it with toxic radiation, Hiroshima has become defined by that moment. Elderly survivors would visit Okazaki’s elementary school to tell stories about what it was like, and on the annual “A-Bomb Day”, on August 6th, sirens would ring out throughout the city at 8:15am.

Hiroshima is where another of Japanese fashion’s most famous designers was born. Issey Miyake grew up surrounded by the immediate fallout of the bomb, in a city that redefined its identity as an emblem of peace. Perhaps that’s why both designers have been able approach the human body with such sensitivity: they grew up knowing how vulnerable it was. Unlike Miyake, who personally survived the bombing and did not speak much about his background until the twilight of his career, seemingly from trauma, Okazaki has enough temporal distance from the tragedy that he is able to confront it more directly.

Okazaki is inspired by the swirling shapes of pottery from the Jomon period (c.14,500 to 300 BC). “Japan is prone to natural disasters, and many people die during those disasters. It’s said that Jomon pottery was created with prayers for a bountiful harvest and for the survival of the people,” he says. His dresses, which can be pink, mint, crimson or black, are simultaneously ancient and futuristic; extraterrestrial yet rooted in nature; threatening yet protective. “To me, fashion is about clothing a living being on this planet. I think of it in biological terms,” he says. “It’s less about lifestyle, and more about what people wear as part of themselves, their attire, their appearance.”

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