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Howdy. I'm super into Japanese clothes and style, like everyone else on the internet is. So let's have a thread dedicated to all the smaller brands that haven't gotten widespread (read: visvim tier) recognition outside of internet clothes-nerd territory. I don't know much about lady's gear but I've been collecting names of brands to search on Y!J for a while and I'm going to share them with you. Please share your fave brands and cool duds that strike your fancy!
I'm gonna avoid listing the super obvious brands like Nonnative, White Mountaineering, etc becuz even tho I love them, I wanna get some recognition for the less-popular labels. it's hard to find good pictures of all the brands and their clothing so bear with me.

EDIT 9/17/15: spoilering some of the picture-heavy posts. If you want some details on these brands scroll down a lil bit. More detailed posts on individual brands and magazine dumps beginning on the second page!

Facetasm, Minotaur, Naissance, Rottweiler, Unused, Isness, HARD HIT, 02Deriv, Gomme Homme, Filmelange

Factotum, Mr. Olive, Phigvel, Ones Stroke, Niuhans

Hurray Hurray, FOB Factory, Bukht, Universal Product, Made In Standard, Digawel

Nitraid, Monkey TIme, Cootie, Efilevol, Waste (twice), Bru Na Boinne

Whereabouts, Rip Van Winkle, Seminead, Stof, The Letters

Still By Hand, Lantiki Crown, Saltwater Cowboy, Curly, Superior Labor

how's the quality with monkey time? lots of cheap pretty cool looking shit on rak

to contribute to the thread n hoolywood is one of my fav brands

The Laundress, Back Alley Old Boys, RIDING HIGH, DressCamp, Five Brother, Roen

Cool idea. Mind posting some info about all those brands? Images are interesting but learning about each brands' ethos and underlying concept, as well as some reviews of goods would make this ace.

some well knowns but check out some highly regarded brands not penetrating the us market:

Matohu







A lot of their work deals with reinterpreting traditional Japanese silhouettes, motifs and themes for contemporary wear.

For a different kind of fashion, here's my favorite Japanese lolita brand: Mary Magdalene. It's more classic and old-world than the usual sweet or gothic styles found in other lolita brands.

Ficouture - travel-friendly bags and accessories; think Porter and Masterpiece. lots of cordura so u know they're tough

Cosmic Wonder Light Source - You prolly know this brand. Casual styling always subverted through clever tailoring and pattern work. lovely fabrics. Some really out-there clothes. They have a few sublabels like Cosmic Wonder Jeans.

White Line - shirting and denim and other staples. Emphasis on casualwear, clothes are based on older pieces of clothing - emotion uncovered

Lowloom - staples remade in denim and indigo. believe it's all made in-house. lots of playful tailoring; shorts are cut long and wide

n-s - (pronounced "no ess") casual clothes with fun details and unorthodox cuts. kinda similar to dulcamara but less wide/weird

Bal - fairly popular streetwear label that makes a lot of different styles of clothes depending on the season/mood. Varies from outdoorsy Nigel Cabourn-kinda stuff to outre Phenomenon colors and prints.

Macbatros - lots of shirting, but if you look around, you can find their neat outerwear (moleskin jackets!). quality is variable, mainly on shirts.

Necessary or Unnecessary - versatile casual pieces with an outdoorsy bent. CPO shirts meet technical raincoats and cordura bags.

Really love this thread, but can we put long lists of pics in spoilers? I'm getting Karpal (ha! japanese brand reference!) tunnel from scrolling and I'm running out of magnets and healing crystals. ;_;

I want to say "can we please" to be polite, but in text it looks sarcastic and condescending. Please tho.

p.s. is Kapital too mainstream? I ordered some pants form them through fromjapan and they just got here today. Will post some pix

Alice Auaa. Goth and goth lolita stuff. Likes to take fairytale themes and such as motifs/ideas for their clothes. Mostly a women's brand, but some stuff is unisex/wearable for men. Very theatrical runway shows, I recommend them.
Quality: mostly unknown, especially for the more lolita stuff. I have a pair of lambskin "jeans" from them which are probably mid-quality. Pants feature an annoying mid-calf split where they joined one piece of leather to another, probably because the hide was not long enough for a single leg. I consider this a sign of lesser quality, but I might be trying to hard too find fault.

Lacey, leather, sometimes fetish-y. Fairytales for the deranged.



Image here.


Potentially NSFW (some vids can be)


Owner lives the look (Yasutaka Funakoshi)

apparently it's a sumo ranking chart. East and west are the traditional divisions, with east being more prestigious (via wikipedia)

Meanswhile
Got launched early last year, more in


ManofMoods (MofM)
Japanese snowboarding brand, they have nice shells and pants, also relatively cheap on y!jp

this is GREAT - thank you so much for sharing this content, I'll definitely dig into it deeper in a bit, look at all the brands.

Random fashion ramblings ... Japanese style in general seems to have this look of effortless or genuinity by having the tailoring always be a little bit 'off' (or at least for the Western menswear consumer) - usually with strange lengths / widths that lie somewhere between zero break and truly cropped - or having a wide leg but a short rise. 3/4 sleeves too. Or wide ones. What I see from a lot of Japanese people my age is a sort of intentional mismatching - stuff like strangely colored tights under jean shorts (for the girls). Weird loafers. Shoe brands relegated to the "tasteless" here. Cut and sew details are a common detail that kind of goes along well with it too. There's always that level of appropriation too - which gives you brand concepts that would be strange here - something like Sassafras who makes gardening themed clothes for men !

But what's the strangest is - how well people make it work! The weirdness looks natural. The key to 'pulling it off', I'm not sure. I think on an internet fashion forum here you'd get a lot of 'this looks off' - because I think a lot of it does. Yet, that's whats so great for it. I've learned its not for me - though I get my fix to some degree through my favorite brand, Engineered Garments, which has a level of Japanese design sensibility but the clothes are very much cut for the American market.

Figure while I'm here I might as well post up one of my favorite brands, Sage de Cret
I have a gorgeous blazer from this brand and I think I sold some cargoes to . I kinda miss them but thats the way it goes.

they often do patchworky pattern swapping, the blazer I have does a bunch of that and the fw 15 collection has some cool examples of it. Otherwise, they reliably create lovely textured casual clothes, with some loosely tailored pieces. Again, if you like EG, Sage de Cret kinda takes that jizz but they avoid heavy workwear vibes with weird/modern pieces (patchwork parka, tapered cargoes). They remind me of a less out-there Talking About The Abstraction, who I will post later. They make some REALLY crazy pieces.

Sage de Cret fw '14


EDIT: sounds cool man, You should post the complete look sometime.

BTW I was reading a book on Japanese designers and they had a big ol list of names. These are Japanese designers who've shown runway collections or worked with Kenzo, Issey, CDG, etc. before starting their own company. Check them out

I've bought several pants from Japan in an effort to find pants that I can fit - too much biking = too tight pants - and unfortunately I've sold pretty much everything I've proxied. I'm always on the hunt for more pants, the weirder the better. Living in Florida makes it unrealistic to spend a lot of money on jackets or outerwear so pants are pretty much as good as I can get.
Here's some:




also: one of my fave lookbooks, Nanamica s/s '13, "One Ocean, All Lands"




Nanamica s/s '14



So, Nanamica is great because they've got the blend of techy fabrics (Gore, windstopper, climacool) with traditional wardrobe staples (macs, baseball caps, kangaroo parkas, hoodies, chinos) and the colors are always like navy, tan and muted earth tones. So super versatile clothes that could be paired with any other brand, Japanese or not. TNF Purple Label is also perfect, field jackets and climber pants done up in gore-tex denim, water-resistant fabrics, etc
Of course, everything is cut great; lots of modern cuts (slim fits) but everything's totally timeless - nothing too skinny, every piece is mature, but there's a youthfulness to it all too (the way the chinos are all rolled up, the light colors). Everything they do is subtly techy, but the pieces are everyday clothes, nothing with the crazy patterns and pieces of facetasm or Sasquatchfabrix Eototo.
The quality is very high and the prices generally match. I think they do their best work with summery looks: there's great flow in their clothes. Lots of straight, clean lines and simple silhouettes in the lookbooks, which isn't even what I usually wear but it just vibes right. The kinda stuff you wear to run errands but done up with sharp cuts and great fabrics. I usually don't care for sweatpants with cuffs but Nanamica's never look slouchy ya know? The cropped pants are definitely strong here. The f/w stuff is excellent but there are a ton of brands doing casual techy jackets and such (2-tacs, And Wander, Made With Standard, even Anachronorm does a couple). The summer stuff isn't as overtly surfy and casual as Sunny Sports and it's not as refined and mature as The Stylist Japan's summery looks.

Taichi Murakami

Previously a worker for M.A+

Uses stuff like konjac for coating. Has done at least one patchwork piece. The "mountain parka" is probably the closest thing to distilling his entire "look" into a single item.

Website doesn't have cool images :(

http://hypebeast.com/tags/six-stories-of-gore-tex

Good series of interviews with Japanese designers specifically about goretex.

I wish nanamica would do more to differentiate purple label from their mainline, they've been converging for the Past ~4 seasons and at this point aside from the really fucking amazing rainforest print and the half dome they're nigh indistinguishable.

Also this thread is like a day old and already a nightmare to load, pls spoiler or make imgur albums yo

Any Western stockists for some of these brands other than Blue Button Shop?

Yantor



Edwina Hoerl



Auttaa



My beautiful Landlet



House of the Very Islands

Some examples of heritage brands that Japanese designers or the Japanese market have influenced. There's a been a big influx of brands coming back from the brink of irrelevance thanks to their popularity in Japanese fashion magazines. Other brands have received a big boost (like Wolverine)

Manastash

Seattle by way of Japan. soon-to-be-defunct brand taps Japanese designers, completely new brand identity is born. Used to have some great climbing shorts, but they were too big...


Browns Beach


Gramicci
Been around forever but was far from 'stylish' in America. Japan has been huge into the brand for a long time, Soph and Nonnative did collabs (Nonnative did a bunch). If anything, Gentry stocking the Tokyo G last year was symbolic of how far the brand has come in terms of being considered fashionable. If you ever need a pair of chinos, the Tokyo G is on Gramicci's website for like $50, comes in a million colors and it's a great pant.


Comme Ca


Margaret Howell
We all know and love her, but the Japanese market just eats up the MHL line like no ones business. Her website even has a Japanese version now. There's a load of Japan-only releases, like the great NB 420s that came out last year. Simple, quality clothes are the Howell trademark


Cash Ca
Company created by ex-Margaret Howell designer, eventually adds Kazuki Kuraishi (also designs KZK for adidas and other stuff) to design after a decade.