Today’s wimpy is a peek inside LGL TOKYO, a newly opened store that is entirely dedicated to vintage Yohji Yamamoto. Finding good archive Yohji in the Japanese capital is surprisingly tough, but LGL is filling the gap by offering a wide variety of pieces from the Yohjiverse. I heard about the opening on the grapevine, and went to meet the store’s founder Matteo Kento Cossu, who hopes to bring about a new community in Tokyo among likeminded fans of the brand.

Beyond the paywall you’ll find info on the backstory of the store, plus a subscriber-exclusive Google Maps link with plenty more secret vintage spots dotted around Tokyo.

Hidden behind an unmarked door in the relaxed Tokyo neighbourhood of Yutenji is one of the most extensive public collections of Yohji Yamamoto in the world. The man behind the newly opened La Grande Lue Tokyo (LGL for short) is Matteo Kento Cossu, a Japanese-Italian Yohji enthusiast who has spent his adult life working with and collecting the brand.

When I meet Matteo at the store, he’s wearing a beige linen suit from Yohji’s 2021 Spring Summer collection. So not all black all the time? “I try not to,” he laughs. It’s a good example of how Matteo, who is 28, is approaching the store’s buy. He has plenty of drapey tailoring and ninja-esque fits for the classic Yohji fans—the so-called karasu zoku (crow tribe) die-hards that dress in all black—but makes an effort to source pieces you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find, and there are a selection of surprisingly vibrant pieces in the store. “It has to be enjoyable for everyone, so people who don’t just wear Yohji can find something for themselves here too,” he says.

Rare grails are everywhere. Hanging next to the till is a leather jacket from Autumn Winter 1991 when Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons held a show together in Tokyo, and on the floor is a cage that contains an original pair of Y-3 F50 TUNIT sneakers that are painted like a blue dragon, created to celebrate the 2006 World Cup. Womenswear takes up the right side of the store, while the rest is menswear, peppered with plenty of Y’s and other diffusion lines from the Yohjiverse. “People used to love the 90s and 80s, but these days people are buying a lot of the black tailoring from the mid-2000s,” says Matteo.

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To thank you for subscribing (and especially big love if you pay), from this week you can expect to see Wimpy slightly more frequently in your inbox. As well as the usual on-the-ground reporting, there’ll be a few more product and brand recommendations, plus plenty of spotlights on people and clothes that you won’t read about anywhere else.

Today’s edition is exactly that: a conversation with Takuro Nakamura, a hairstylist in Tokyo who moonlights as a clothing painter. What is a clothing painter, you ask? Ahead of an exciting collaboration he’s doing with Maidens Shop this weekend—where he’ll be selling and painting one-of-a-kind American vintage items curated by the store—I caught up with Takuro to find out.

Hi Takuro! Could you tell me a bit about yourself? Where are you from in Japan, and what do you do?

I’m originally from Yamanashi Prefecture and I currently live and work in Tokyo. I own a hair salon called Laughful in Jingumae and work as a hairstylist. Alongside that, I create hand-painted pieces, mainly using clothing as my canvas. I describe what I do as a ‘Clothing Painter’. There are similarities between the two jobs: as a hairstylist, I think about what suits each individual person, taking into account things like their hair and bone structure, and I approach painting clothing in the same way. Each piece has a different fabric and condition, and so I think about what will work best.

I heard that you’re a clothing die-hard too. How did you catch the fashion bug?

I love clothes so much that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I became a hairstylist so I could buy clothes, and now I paint so that I can buy clothes too. My interest in clothing really started when I was getting ready for my first date. I had no idea what I should wear, so I asked my mother for help and we went shopping together. I was a football-obsessed kid and pretty much owned nothing except my school uniform and sportswear, so I remember panicking at the time. After that, I started visiting local select shops all the time and spending almost all the money I earned from part-time jobs on clothes.

What are your favourite brands?

It’s very difficult for me to name just one! Select shops were a big part of what expanded my interest in clothing, though, so if you asked me to name my favourite shop, that would be easy: Maidens Shop! My salon is in Jingumae in Shibuya, and when I was looking for an area to open my salon, the fact that Maidens Shop was there was actually one of the reasons I decided on that neighbourhood. I’ve always been drawn to their world and the way they curate things. Some of the brands I particularly enjoy wearing at the moment are Lea Boberg, Gabriela Coll Garments, Pam Dietrich, Monad London and Oliver Church.

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It’s also, roughly, one year of Wimpy! So consider this an annual editor’s letter, and indulge me a few minutes of reflection. Thank you as always for being here, and stay tuned over the next few weeks for plenty of interviews and features with very interesting people in fashion that, happily, have nothing to do with me at all.

I get asked often why I moved to Tokyo. Even though I’ve had hundreds of chances to hone my answer, I don’t really have one. I got married. I was bored of London. It’s more exciting to write about fashion in Japan than in the UK. All true, technically, but the truer answer is that it was decided for me a long time ago.

When I was around eight or nine, my dad took me to karate class. I was a skinny, pale and relatively wimpy(!) kid and I imagine he thought some time in the dojo would toughen me up. Against the odds I was pretty locked in with it. I won a tiny handful of trophies in local competitions, and then gave it up at around sixteen to focus on the more important things: backcombing my hair, getting drunk at house parties, and pretending I was in Skins.

But Japan was always there. What nineties kid could be immune? Pokémon, PlayStation, Studio Ghibli—all of these exports painted my childhood much more vividly than anything Britain could produce. One of my rosiest memories is waking up early in the winter when it was snowing outside to sit by the radiator in the kitchen and play Pokémon Crystal before school. Psychic Force, my karate gi, the knockoff Noguchi lantern that hung on my bedroom ceiling… Later, an ex-girlfriend who was studying fashion would print out pictures of old Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons shows to stick into her sketchbooks. Peering from underneath my Indie Sleaze haircut, I thought they were the wildest things I’d ever seen.

A lifetime later, here I am in my apartment in Tokyo.

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Today’s mini edition is an introduction to Kanta Inoue, a 23-year-old Tokyo designer whose brand, KANTA, caught my attention over the summer. Only in his second season, Kanta brings a strange new structure to upcycled T-shirts that I’d never seen before, and does something very cool with the legs and sleeves of jeans and worker jackets. It’s free to read—enjoy!

When Kanta Inoue was browsing the rails at a 2nd Street thrift store chain in Osaka, he came across something he didn’t expect to find: a pair of jeans from his graduate collection.

For the fashion designer, who was born in Osaka but is now based in Tokyo, seeing his own jeans in one of Japan’s biggest secondhand clothing chains threw up some complicated feelings. Somebody bought them—great! Then they left it at the thrift store—not so great. But but but! There they were, on the rail next to Margiela! Next to Undercover! Is this what it feels like to put your clothes out into the world?

“I was a little sad about it, but seeing my own brand there, hanging up next to all these other brands, made me feel like I’d gained some recognition,” said Inoue at his sunlit showroom in Ebisu, which he’d hired for a week in July and was manning himself.

He called his SS27 collection ‘3rd Street’ in an effort to capture that feeling, and made some strangely captivating clothes that we’ll get into below. “I want Kanta to exist not only on the racks of new clothing stores, but also in second-hand clothing stores. Not to disappear as soon as someone buys it, but to remain as part of the scenery,” he wrote in the press notes.

Inoue has big plans for Kanta. The 23-year-old recently left his job at Doublet, where he worked in planning and production while learning about running the brand, and intends to work on Kanta full time. He is now in the second season of the brand and has already caught the attention of the buying team at Dover Street Market Ginza.

He likes Duran Lantink, and similarly to the Dutch designer, makes clothes that warp and enhance the human body rather than just flatter it. Using soft-edge foam tape—the kind parents put on table corners to protect their toddlers’ heads—he transformed the silhouette of polo shirts and T-shirts, sewing the tape like boning to create curves and structure that feels strangely machinelike. Trying them on in the showroom, I somehow felt I had dressed as a car. Other pieces included floaty shirts and trousers in jacquard printed with pink and green camouflage: “I wanted to do an elegant take on camo.”

Most wearable, though, were his jackets and jeans which have a trademark twist: they’re slashed at the arms and knees and spliced with ribbed cotton, like Carhartt duck jackets that have dislocated at the joints. They are Kanta’s ‘push puppet’ series, inspired by the little wooden animal toys that collapse when you press the base. Weird and visceral! But also the kind of thing that toes the impossible line between a jacket you could wear to a fashion show and one you could throw on to go and buy milk.

The push puppet and the foam tape series also include remade pieces upcycled from real thrift store finds. He’d also printed racks of thrift store clothes onto hoodies and jeans in a more literal reference to 2nd Street, and also made a wearable rack of T-shirts. His first collection featured a top/dress made entirely of interlocked baby bibs.

“I don’t really picture a person wearing the clothes while I’m making them,” said Inoue. “For pieces like these, I focus on creating a beautiful silhouette while they’re hanging on the rack. I’m a fashion designer, but my process is a bit more like interior design, almost like creating a sculpture.”

It’s very early days for the designer, but my Wimpy Talent Scout Goggles™ tell me that we’ll be seeing more of Kanta in the future. For now, his clothes remain deliciously difficult to find, with a very select few stockists in Japan for the AW26 season, including R for D in Tokyo and Hankyu Osaka’s Garage D. Edit. Or, you could try your luck in 2nd Street.

Today’s edition is about Oliver Church, who runs Oliver Church Singular Garments, a very slow fashion brand based in Paris, with devotees from New York to Osaka.

I was first introduced to Oliver a few years ago by a good mutual friend and find him to be a refreshing presence in the fashion industry. He’s also got excellent chat. This summer, just before fashion week kicked off, we spent an afternoon chatting at his Paris studio before he took us for noodles and a couple of glasses of off-menu plum wine at his local Vietnamese lunch spot. Enjoy!

“I’m just finishing a pair of shorts, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

It’s a sweltering 39 degrees in Paris—undeniably shorts weather—and Oliver Church can whip up a pair on a whim.

The 35-year-old New Zealander is an old-world image of a fashion designer, before designers were even a thing: he makes clothes by himself alone in his studio, sourcing mostly antique and vintage fabrics that he transforms into what he calls ‘Singular Garments’. When he appears at the door of his studio, he’s wearing the blue pair of cotton shorts, hot off the sewing machine. “I got to work and was like, I need a new pair of shorts, so I made some,” he says. “Brill!”

His sunlit studio, which he moved into recently, is a few floors up in a large building in the 10th arrondissement. There’s a large cutting table by the window, and a desk and sewing machine above which is a bookshelf stacked with guides to sewing and embroidery; rails on either side hold works in progress or vintage pieces, and a sprig of lavender hangs on the wall. “The lavender is good because I use a lot of antique materials, so some of them are stuffy,” he says. “It keeps out moths, and I love flowers.”

Three or four days a week, Church holes up in his studio for 12 hours a day, where he divides his time between each garment. Depending on the piece, he can do the machine work for two items in a single day. Button holes take 12-25 minutes each, and he might add a herringbone stitch to a shirt collar or finish a sleeve by hand. He mostly makes shirts, which start at €700, as well as jackets and occasionally trousers. Each piece comes with a strip of extra fabric, with the intention that you can use it to repair the piece. These are, without cliche, clothes to last a lifetime.

“I don’t produce pieces that I don’t like. And I’ve never worked anywhere where that was the case,” he says. “There were always some pieces in the collection where you go, meh, because you’re trying to hit all categories.” Later this year, he will release knitwear for the first time, made in collaboration with an Italian mill that his friend, the designer Evan Kinori, introduced him to. “It felt like the right fit, a small artisanal factory with an incredible dedication to their work.”

The designer’s output is under 200 pieces a year, and he intends to keep it that way until retirement. “Or arthritis,” he laughs. He currently sends his singular garments to 12 stores that include Mouki Mou in London, Maidens Shop in Tokyo, and Neighbour in Vancouver—the S-tier retailers, in other words.

The one that got to him first, though, was Localers, a pioneering store in the small city of Morioka in northern Japan. “I remember feeling strangely drawn to his work,” says Localers’ founder Yoshi Nakamura. “I cannot quite explain why, but it may have been my instinct as a buyer.” He messaged Church and ordered a jacket, appropriately called the Big Pocket Jacket. “What I find most compelling about his clothes is the sense that they carry a soul, and that he truly engages with each piece he creates,” says Nakamura. “He is not influenced by trends at all, and in this fast-moving fashion industry, he is trying to establish a new kind of business model.”

Church works mainly with vintage and antique textiles, which he sources from a small network of fabric-dealing brocanteurs. “Oliver has a truly exceptional eye for selecting textiles,” says Shinya Makino, founder of Maidens Shop, who was first introduced to Church by Yoshi and is now one of his biggest stockists. Makino points out Church’s use of antique Kelsch, a checked fabric made in Alsace. It’s robust, with a slubby texture and a slight bounce; the kind of thing that lasts for decades. “There was one occasion when Oliver and I found some vintage Kelsch fabric together at a flea market, and he made garments from it especially for us.”

The arrival of Church’s brand has coincided with a growing appeal for clothes in natural fabrics that are made in small runs. The designer is wary of this, and intends his clothes to live beyond the moment. “I guess I am hoping to make something a bit anachronistic or sitting outside of time. Not timeless in a commercial way, but timeless in that it does not belong to any time in particular.”

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Welcome back to Wimpy! I am finally back in Tokyo after way too long in Europe, armed with an arsenal of unique profiles from opinionated designers spanning Paris to New Delhi to Tokyo, and some silly-but-serious menswear analysis.

Below, a full review of Soshiotsuki’s Spring Summer 2027 collection, which also marked the designer’s debut at Paris Fashion Week. I’ve been covering Otsuki’s work for the best part of four years, and it was oddly emotional seeing him surrounded by the press in Paris this season. But was it any good? And can Otsuki’s brand of nostalgia really move the needle? Let’s get into it.

Soshi Otsuki has landed in Paris.

The Tokyo-based designer won last year’s LVMH Prize, his salaryman lookbooks have been consistently viral on Instagram for the past few seasons, and his show at Pitti Uomo in January was a roaring success. Could he keep up momentum on fashion’s biggest platform? I’ll get into the full review below, but first I want to pick up on where Otsuki currently sits in the pantheon of Japanese designers, and what it means for menswear at large.

As a new Japanese addition to the schedule, Otsuki is not alone. Auralee and Ssstein are the other buzzy new(ish) kids on the block and though they are true to how menswear guys currently want to dress, both are fundamentally product-focused labels more adept in making immaculate jackets and trousers in superior fabrics than they are in indulging in high fashion fantasy or sparking conversations that reach beyond clothing.

With his vision of the cinematic salaryman, Otsuki is able to do both: the menswear guys love it, and now we know that the front row do too. Doublet’s Masayuki Ino became the first Japanese designer to win the LVMH Prize back in 2018, but not since Undercover or Sacai has a brand caused as much conversation in the wider industry as Soshiotsuki. The jury is still somewhat out on the buyers (the only international stockists listed on the brand’s website are Huiben Shop in NYC and LA’s H.Lorenzo, though I know FWRD is picking it up from this season), but the brand reports that it is selling well.

Otsuki’s collections over the past few seasons have referenced the golden era of the salaryman, when the yen was at its height and guys were spending it on expensive Italian suits. On the surface it looks like he’s referencing Armani, but what he’s really riffing on is a Japanese perception of Western luxury, with Armani as a vector, splicing those Italian tailoring references with kimono silhouettes. Before Otsuki was hooked on the salaryman stuff, his designs took more literal cues from Japanese culture, with references to Shinto temples and ninja uniforms.

Otsuki has also spoken about observing an inferiority complex among Japanese people with their desire to dress in Western brands (and indeed how the Western business suit colonised the kimono), and so we might think of his brand as a melting down of Western and Japanese fashion in order to forge something genuinely new: tailoring that infuses the structure of a Western business suit with the easy elegance of a kimono.

Here in Paris, Otsuki’s impervious salaryman was on his summer holidays, captured in a rare moment of vulnerability. Shown on a sweaty summer evening in Paris, models walked the long stone courtyard in off duty suiting: sax blue shirts with collars poking out from baggy blazers, and coats slung over the arm as though heading home from a long day at the office, styled with closed-toe leather sandals and the brand’s retro-casual collab with ASICS.

Striped boxer shorts in paper-thin cotton peeked out from cut-offs worn with undone belts, and trousers were often knee-length, hemmed as though they had been rolled up for a paddle in the sea. “I wanted to express that specific feeling—the funny contrast of someone who is usually serious and strict letting loose at a resort, maybe even accidentally showing their underwear,” he said backstage afterwards.

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In the meantime, I have had the luxury of letting everything I saw on and off the runway in Paris marinate in my mind, and below, I present to you a list of things you need to know about menswear from the Spring/Summer 2027 season that was.

Bare skin wins

What is fashion good for if not solutions? Dressing for ridiculously hot weather was on everyone’s mind, and there was plenty of ideas on the runway: plunging silky necklines at Dries van Noten, thigh-grazing pyjama shorts at Soshi Otsuki and shirts unbuttoned to oblivion at Amiri (or shirts that almost didn’t exist at Saint Laurent). It was largely a romantic & tasteful state of undress rather than a slutty one though: when it’s this hot, the thought of touching another sweaty body loses its appeal.

The Escaping Collar is the thing

First spotted last season, the Escaping Collar is an asymmetric styling trick where one side of your collar is tucked under your jumper or jacket while the other one breaks free, you know, to channel some insouciance. It was back and bigger this season, seen at Auralee, Feng Chen Wang, Ssstein, Mihara Yasuhiro and Givenchy.

Slim pants are back… if you want them

Even the pants are on ozempic. First proposed by Prada this season and then hammered home by Celine, Dior and Auralee, trousers on the runway were slimmer than they have been in years. But—and it’s a baggy but—a lot of wide-leg shapes remained in the mix, even at the aforementioned brands, so a full Hedi Slimane renaissance isn’t on the cards just yet. Shinya Kozuka’s baggy pants collaboration with Dickies, which are surely the largest pants to have ever hit the market, have been a sellout success.

Everybody loves Michael Rider

Michael Rider won this season’s popularity contest, no question. And though his first full menswear show for Céline was full of charmingly unusual clothes that sounded terrible on paper but looked great IRL (librarian-worthy knitted vests, glittery tasselled belts and shrunken beige tailoring), there are plenty of other reasons to like him. Before Rider took the top job at Céline, he taught French to refugees in Calais, and this season he partnered with the Institut Français de la Mode to offer a six-month internship to a graduating student. There’s nothing chicer than altruism.

Studio Nicholson is a runway brand now

ICYMI, London designer and queen of minimalism Nick Wakeman put on her debut runway show for Studio Nicholson in Paris. The clothes are straightforward enough to file under ‘does it really need a runway show?’, but over the past decade the brand has had an undeniable impact on how cosmopolitan men dress and has earned its place on the calendar. I’m told the brand will show consistently from this season, meaning we can expect to see more of Wakeman’s clean, architectural vision on the runway. And if anyone can continue to drum up appeal for capacious pants, it’ll be her.

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“I have a dinner to go to later and I don’t have time to change,” a Japanese editor friend told me at breakfast during Pitti, no matter that it was human body temperature outside on the streets of Florence. Fashion is an endurance sport!

I resigned myself to a T-shirt and shorts for the bulk of the men’s trade show, and could only admire the mettle of the people who actually turned it out. Still, though conversation throughout the week was mostly reduced to “pffttt it’s boiling” and “what time’s your flight out of here?”, there were plenty of interesting clothes to see.

A FORCE FROM ABOVE

While everyone else at Pitti was grumbling about the sun, designer Jiyong Kim had harnessed its power to make beautiful clothes. The Seoul-based designer was a special guest at Pitti this season, and uses sun-bleaching to create unique patterns on his clothes. He rents land in a secret location in Korea where he hangs fabrics on fences and lets the daylight do the rest.

Kim held an exhibition that featured 35 coats that showed, in increments, the effects of time the fabric had spent outdoors. Also notable is his ongoing collaboration with Puma; at Pitti he debuted a new iteration of the Geo Cell 1, inspired by decaying paper.

PUNKS OF ALL KINDS

The headliner of the week was Simone Rocha, who showed her first standalone men’s collection on stage at the Teatro della Pergola. It was the effete take on menswear that Rocha is known for, this time featuring backless blazers framed with white lace, broderie anglaise shirts, and ballet slippers decorated with pearls, woven in with complications of layered gingham and ruched tailoring. “It feels tender but I also think it feels quite grounded. I wanted there to be a beauty, but also a realism to the proposal,” said Rocha during a preview.

I’ve read some hot takes wondering why her menswear needed a separate show, and that the designer could have just woven it in with her womenswear as usual. But in the context of Pitti, where traditionally masculine tailoring rules, it was good to see something transgressive and flouncy. A little tenderness? That’s punk, too.

Comme des Garcons’ Kei Ninomiya, mostly known for his avant-garde womenswear, also held his first menswear runway show. Dover Street Market has set him the task of designing its in-house label, which is now in its third season and is a way for the department store to capitalise on its cultural clout. The show took place at 10pm (!) in the dusty construction site of a former Florentine convent, where an army of lads strode out in purple plaid skirts (DSM has designed its own tartan), leather jackets festooned with safety pins, and button-laden tailoring in homage to the British punk Judy Blame.

The seen-it-all-before references made it a relatively toothless representation of punk (and really, how punk can a line by a department store possibly be, anyway?), but it was a joyful one nonetheless, thanks in part to the incredible gravity-defying mohawks that blossomed with flowers. (Fun fact: Ninomiya himself sports a tall black mohawk, and is never seen without it. He even takes flights with it. The story at CDG HQ goes that once during a business trip, a colleague knocked on his hotel room door to see if he would join them for breakfast, and he answered at once, his hair already spiked into the sky.)

The most real punk thing I saw at the fair was William Palmer, the British designer who graduated from CSM just last year and won this year’s I:C Pitti Immagine award, which facilitated him a modest presentation at the fair. Palmer’s collection was partly inspired by the British comedy The Full Monty, and featured neckties flopped out of trouser flies, suits turned into nun’s habits, and shorts that had been tailored so they sported an unsettlingly fat crotch, playing with office dress codes in ways that felt new and actually entertaining. “It’s like a fuck you to capitalism,” the designer said. I couldn’t tell you that any of it was convincingly wearable, but Palmer is still fresh out of the oven, and I’m excited to see what he’ll do when his clothes hit the runway.

BETTER A FRIEND

A few people asked for my thoughts on Nigo’s Human Made acquiring Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. Apart from the fact that Yohji and Rei used to date, Nigo and Jonio represent Japanese fashion’s most heartwarming union! The two go way back to the early nineties, when together they founded the now-defunct Tokyo boutique Nowhere, and subsequently helped birth the Ura-Harajuku scene.

Though both designers have had huge international success, Nigo has made a lot more money. Takahashi’s avant-garde runway shows—from his famous SCAB collection in 2003 to the light-up terrarium dresses twenty years later— have marked him out as the most creative Japanese designer of his generation, whereas Nigo’s streetwear vibe was always more… mass. It culminated in the historic listing of Human Made Inc. on the Tokyo Stock Exchange at the end of last year; its share price has soared 70% in the months since.

So what does it mean now that Nigo is essentially buying out his friend? In recent years, Takahashi has been more and more focused on his surrealist painting, and said that he prefers that to designing. He has also spoken about the financial constraints of showing in Paris, and has pared his men’s shows back to lookbooks in recent seasons. It’s unclear whether Undercover was actually in financial trouble, but maybe a good friend arrived at the right time.

Ultimately, the buyout means that Undercover’s legacy is secured, and both men will die rich enough to build their tombs out of Supreme bricks. We can’t know yet how the deal (which is still yet to be finalised) will impact Undercover’s output, but the point is this: if you must sell out, better to sell out to a friend.

HEAT TECHNOLOGY

• As the summers in Europe become evermore unbearable, sun umbrellas will surely start to become more normalised at fashion week. Surely! This time, the only people I saw using them in Florence were a group of Asian tourists, and menswear icon Nick Wooster, who was dressed entirely in white and told me “I don’t care, I need one in this heat.” My wife Reina swears by them too, and gets hers from Montbell.

• Biggest regret of the season, once more, was not bringing my air-conditioned vest from Hidesign to the shows, because I couldn’t be bothered to pack the battery pack. When will I learn?

• I have no choice but to glaze Jian Deleon, whose consecutive Knicks-themed fits (and blue & orange loafers) stole the week. Less noticed was his secret weapon for the heat: a portable fan from Chinese brand Jisulife.

Kyoto has some of the most charming clothes shops in Japan—and thus the world. In the country’s original capital it’s not about big shopping centres or even photogenic concept stores, but the small, independent and often totally hidden shops that have creative freedom to hang their racks with exactly what they please.

I visit Kyoto a few times a year, and when I’m cycling through the flagstoned backstreets lined with the rain-stained timber of Edo-style buildings, I always think how great it would be to live there. Kyoto people have a reputation—at least among Tokyoites—for being somewhat snooty and unwelcoming to outsiders, but I’ve found the city to be a warm and open place.

Below, I’ve put together a guide of the eleven best stores to shop for clothes in Kyoto, plus a Google map link with even more. As well as providing a gateway to some lesser-known brands from Japan and elsewhere, it serves as a small directory to some of the world’s most beautiful stores. From where to buy the best artisan menswear to a secret shop in the hills, these are the best places to shop in Kyoto.

A paid subscription to Wimpy gives you access to previous shopping guides (including where to buy antique clothes in Tokyo, the stores I recommend to friends, and the best places to shop in Seoul), as well as upcoming guides and the full archive.

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The Immortal Snail Theory is a thought experiment that asks if you would accept unfathomable wealth and immortality on the condition that an indestructible, super-intelligent snail stalks you for eternity, and would kill you if it touches you. I’d doom-scrolled past this years ago and had never really given it much thought, but lately I’ve been thinking about snails (or slugs) more than usual.

On a recent weekend at Tokyo’s Oedo Antique Market, I met a young dealer called Hayato who had ridden the shinkansen up from Kyoto, where he runs the store Mu. Hayato, who had a big grin and an orange buzzcut, was selling a couple of chewed up V-neck sweaters that he told me were from before WWII, and that presumably — a very long time ago — used to be white. What appealed to me was the accumulation of rips and patches that could only be achieved over many decades of wear, and a patina that would be impossible to replicate. I bought it from him for ¥9,000 ($56).

When I opened it out to get a closer look, there was a tiny slug still wriggling around on the sleeve that Hayato flicked into a nearby bush. I thought maybe this little guy had contributed to the wear of the sweater, but Google told me that slugs don’t eat fabric (although apparently snails do).

This all reminded me of Karim Hadjab, the Paris-based designer who goes to extreme lengths to naturally age his post-apocalyptic clothes. When I met Hadjab last year at a pop-up at vintage store Sinot, he told me that he does in fact use slugs to corrode his designs, which are often so raggedy that they look as though they have been excavated from a nuclear exclusion zone.

Here’s what I jotted down in my Notes app after visiting Hadjab’s exhibition:

“One black and blue-dyed jacket had been eroded over the chest and shoulders, an effect that Hadjab explained came from the slimy trails of limace (slugs).1

Another was covered in a spattered pattern of grey mould, that Hadjab had preserved by covering it in a medicinal cream — the kind of topical gel usually applied to burn victims, resulting in a vinyl sheen. Elsewhere, an unknown bacteria had devoured an Adidas jersey to a sporty spectre of its former self, decaying its synthetic fabric into a sheer and delicate gossamer.

In the store, some of the shirts were hooked up to IV drips, so that they appeared like patients being treated on a hospital ward.

[This post continues beyond the paywall. To keep reading and access the full Wimpy archive, become a paid subscriber]

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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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