A showroom appointment with Kiichiro Asakawa is always fun. The 37-year-old Stein designer, who is tall, with lots of curly hair and tinted glasses, combs through his clothes rails at light speed, excitedly pulls out a leather jacket or cashmere coat and explains the great thought he has put into crafting every piece.
Asakawa approaches his work like a mad scientist in a lab, experimenting with fabrics, textures and silhouettes, adjusting the weight of a fabric here or the placement of a pocket there until – eureka! – he has it. “I might see a piece of clothing in a movie that I thought was cool, and the afterimage of that silhouette stays in my mind. But I can’t create that silhouette unless I create the fabric that I imagine,” he said. The designer’s experiments are an attempt to figure out how to make the perfect images in his mind’s eye a reality.
This season, the eureka moments were reflected in a series of jeans with twisted seams or elongated darts, elegant tailored cargo trousers, a reversible double-sided wool cardigan and a brilliantly light and slightly spongy hoodie, which he explained was made of ruffled nylon sandwiched between two layers of cotton jersey “like cardboard,” with pleats on the sides and back to create a cocoon shape. Cool on the hanger, sure, but when you tried it, genius! “This time I made things that are more comfortable to wear, but with an elegant look,” he explained. “It’s about the beauty of being natural and feeling good about it.”
With experience as a fashion buyer, Asakawa consistently combines his keen eye for product with an almost pathological obsession with manufacturing, and this was another collection that expertly combined the chic and commercial. It’s no surprise that business is booming: although it was only founded in 2016, the Tokyo-based brand now has 32 global suppliers, from Scandinavia to the US.
Still, Stein’s laser focus on making impressive products can sometimes leave the larger sense of brand identity undercooked. Asakawa knows how to make formidable clothes; now he has to build the world around it.