A showroom appointment with Kiichiro Asakawa is at all times good enjoyable. The 37-year-old Stein designer, who’s tall, with a mass of curly hair and tinted spectacles, combs by way of his clothes rails at gentle velocity, excitedly pulling out a leather-based jacket or cashmere coat and explaining the appreciable thought that he put into fabricating each bit.
Asakawa approaches his work like a mad scientist in a laboratory, experimenting with materials, textures, and silhouettes, tweaking the burden of a material right here or a pocket placement there till—eureka!—he has it. “I’d see a bit of clothes in a film that I believed was cool, and the afterimage of that silhouette stays in my thoughts. However I can’t create that silhouette except I create the material I think about,” he mentioned. The designer’s experiments are an try to work out learn how to make the right photographs in his thoughts’s eye a actuality.
This season, the eureka moments got here by way of in a collection of denims with twisted seams or elongated darts, a sublime pair of tailor-made cargo pants, a reversible double-faced wool cardigan, and a brilliantly gentle and barely spongy hoodie, which he defined was fabricated from corrugated nylon that had been sandwiched between two layers of cotton jersey “like cardboard,” with tucks sewn in on the sides and again to create a cocoon form. Cool on the hanger, certain, however whenever you tried it on, genius! “This time I made issues which can be extra snug to put on, however with a sublime temper,” he defined. “It’s about the fantastic thing about being pure, and feeling good about it.”
With expertise as a trend purchaser, Asakawa persistently combines his sharp eye for product with a near-pathological obsession with fabrication, and this was one other assortment that expertly chimed the stylish and business. No shock that enterprise is booming—although it was solely based in 2016, the Tokyo-based model now has 32 world stockists, from Scandinavia to the U.S.
Nonetheless, Stein’s laser-focus on making spectacular product can imply its bigger sense of name identification typically feels undercooked. Asakawa is aware of learn how to create formidable clothes; now he wants to complete constructing the world round it.