Lifestyle
Grief changes you. Michael Arceneaux is writing through it
Michael Arceneaux at the Hollyhock House. Arceneaux wears Loewe shirt, Isabel Marant denim jeans and jacket, Louis Vuitton shoes, Akoni glasses.
(Gabriel S. Lopez/For The Times)
Forty-eight hours of torrential downpour betray the natural logic of Los Angeles. Submerged roadways, mudslides and record-setting rainfall have transformed the Southland city into an obstacle course out of the apocalypse, the very scene you’d see in a movie before everything goes full dystopia. Withstanding extreme conditions is nothing new for Michael Arceneaux, who has made a career out of navigating unstable ground. Today is just another Wednesday.
As we sit to talk on the balcony of his Koreatown apartment, seven stories up, the rain has finally stopped despite a procession of chubby gray clouds that hang like prop art in the sky, threatening to disrupt what momentary peace we’ve found. For now the storm is over. The context is appropriate given what Arceneaux, 39, has faced in the last year, losing his mother to cancer in October. And a close friend before that. “I am in my sad boy era,” he jokes.
I want to tell him that storms don’t last forever but people in the midst of intense grief don’t need cheesy Hallmark cliches. Instead, I promise to listen and be there for him. It has been a great fortune of mine to call Michael a friend since 2004. The orbit of our friendship began that summer, before either of us made it as writers, and what I knew of him then is even more vivid and electric now: He is as genuine, witty and insightful as they come.
“Grief is just a really uncomfortable subject.”
— Michael Arceneaux
Michael grew up the middle child in a subdivision of Houston named Windsor Village. He attended Howard University, where he studied broadcast journalism, and later started the Cynical Ones, a blog that earned him the reputation as an original voice on matters of race, politics and pop culture. He’s written for just about everybody — the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Ebony, Essence — and is currently developing a TV series inspired by his first memoir of essays.
Michael’s latest book, “I Finally Bought Some Jordans” (out March 12), is a profoundly felt coda to his “I” trilogy, which began in 2018 with “I Can’t Date Jesus,” a New York Times bestseller, and was followed by “I Don’t Want to Die Poor” in 2020, an essay collection about debt and shame. “Jordans” is a noticeable detour from those previous offerings — its centerpiece is grief.
Through a series of serpentine encounters, touring from New York City to Houston to L.A., with the COVID-19 pandemic as its backdrop, the book addresses millennial angst and its many challenges. Throughout, Michael prevails as his characteristically funny self, scrutinizing au courant artwork (on “Slave Play”: “It makes you think. Much of what I thought throughout the play was, What the f—?”) while learning to find joy in middle age and local Tex-Mex delicacies, like the crab nachos from Cyclone Anaya’s, a beloved Houston eatery.
Still, the reality of what he’s weathered can’t be avoided. “Grief is just a really uncomfortable subject.” He tells me he didn’t want to avoid it. That he couldn’t. That he had to write about it. Write through it. So that’s exactly what he did.
Jason Parham: Prepping for the interview I realized it’s been 20 years, this year, that we’ve known each other.
Michael Arceneaux: It has.
JP: I’ve always admired how gracious you are when greeting folks. So I’d like to begin where you always begin with me. How are you?
MA: I’m actually having a really difficult time. Last year was the worst year of my life. I’m really deep in grief. But I have no choice but to pull it together to an extent because I don’t want this [book] to fail. And I don’t want to fail.
Arceneaux’s latest book, “I Finally Bought Some Jordans” (out March 12), is a profoundly felt coda to his “I” trilogy. Arceneaux wears Louis Vuitton shirt, trousers, jacket.
(Gabriel S. Lopez/For The Times)
JP: I wouldn’t call three books a failure.
MA: No. But I always worried about how Zora Neale Hurston died poor. If not for Alice Walker, literally all of her work would be lost. And that’s the case for a lot of Black writers and creatives. Not to be overly cynical — and this was something I told my mom because it was how I felt — I’m like, ‘I would probably be more valuable dead than alive.’ In my mind I already know how that goes, and it’s very true of a lot of people.
JP: Too many people.
MA: The point of the book is, I thought I would be in a certain place. I’ve made some strides that I’m happy with, but it’s not exactly what I thought it would be. And a lot of that stuff is beyond my control. That’s always been the case. It’s about accepting that. I’m very self-critical, and while I don’t want to value my work solely by monetary meaning, it’s hard to ignore that no matter how successful you’ve been or appear to be.
It’s a hard time to be a creative. There’s a real devaluing of what I do for a living. It’s unsettling. The [Hollywood writers] strike was really painful. Last year, like a lot of people, I felt it. It didn’t matter what level you were at — especially if you were Black. The discomfort is a wake-up call.
JP: It’s so different from when we started. You created a blog in 2005, the Cynical Ones. Are you nostalgic at all for that time in media?
MA: I wouldn’t say nostalgic. Something I wrestle with is that my writing and my pursuits kept me away from my mom. Ultimately I have to find my way and see things through. I’m not the first person to say this, but I’m learning in grief that I am a different person after losing her. Part of that is rediscovering an actual love of writing. This is a roundabout way of saying maybe I should do a newsletter. Maybe it can be something I play with. Because I started a blog to find my voice and get better as a writer. Samantha Irby has told me to do one forever. She has one where she does Judge Mathis recaps.
JP: Wait, really?
MA: Yes, it’s hilarious. I highly recommend it. Clearly I have a lot of complaints, but I still want to enjoy this. I didn’t put so much work and effort into this to not enjoy it. So much of what my ambition was rooted in is now a reward that can’t be given. It’s become, ‘How can I continue to enjoy what I’m writing?’
JP: That’s important.
MA: I don’t say this arrogantly, but anybody that’s both Black and queer, being pioneering is exhausting. You’re constantly having to change people’s perceptions. And in this climate it’s harder than ever.
JP: Rarely is Black art allowed to just exist.
“I’m not the first person to say this, but I’m learning in grief that I am a different person after losing her.”
— Michael Arceneaux
MA: I get the critique about that. Unfortunately, we live in the world as is and not how we want it to be. But if you very much stick to your voice and commit to it, all of that will shine through. I always remember how hard it was to get “I Can’t Date Jesus” published because everything mirrors that process, in that people have very limited ideas of what they think queer means, what gay means, what Black means, how that presents, what that sounds like. I hear the dumbest things. The same things I heard in publishing I hear even worse in television, even if it’s delivered with a smile. I’m exhausted from dealing with people’s prejudice.
JP: Was writing always your path?
MA: I was pushed into freelancing. I’m disappointed more writers are being pushed into it because people who don’t know what they’re doing are running companies into the ground, and everybody else is left to deal with it. A lot of the lamenting I’ve seen for media this year, I didn’t see that for all the Black media that was decimated a decade ago. And it doesn’t make what’s going on now any less awful, but it’s been an obvious problem for a while.
JP: You wrestle with that sentiment quite beautifully in the book, the difficulty in shouldering collective grief — what’s happening in the world — alongside private grief.
MA: I was very adamant during the promotion of my first book — because I felt it already happening — about not being boxed in. I didn’t want to be that sad gay person. I didn’t want to perpetuate certain tropes. Not that I carry that burden but it was in the back of my mind. That said, initially I had an idea of what I wanted the most recent book to be when I had a different title. Then life happened. It forced me to be more honest about how I felt, even about things I thought were settled. Clearly a block was there.
When I told my mom about the book, she said, ‘You’re angry.’ I didn’t think so, but I did recognize that there were unresolved feelings from my childhood. Now it’s become about accepting that some things won’t change. You won’t necessarily get that happy ending. I intended for this trio of books to end on a brighter note as I enter middle age, but life doesn’t work that way. Look at what’s happening around us.
JP: But I think the book is more relatable that way. More human. Life takes a curve; sure, it’s not what you expected, but you do your best to find hope and humor in the darkness. And maybe that hope takes the form of a haircut. You write about how getting a cut was a small way of regaining control. We’re the same in that we believe in the restorative power of a fade. There’s almost nothing that a fresh cut can’t fix, even if only momentarily.
“I was very adamant during the promotion of my first book — because I felt it already happening — about not being boxed in,” says Arceneaux. The writer stands outside the Hollyhock House, wearing Dior Men’s shirt and shoes, Zegna trousers, Canali coat.
(Gabriel S. Lopez/For The Times)
MA: There are people whose lives were destroyed when the plague happened and I want to acknowledge that. I worked really hard to make the first book happen. Going into the second book, it was about trying to get over life’s humps. Overall I was still fortunate that year. But I was struggling in the apartment I was in, in such a small space. I was alone. I’m not with my family. I don’t know what’s going on. I’d already experienced COVID, so I knew what it felt like.
The second book wasn’t the most important thing but I wanted it to reach people. I couldn’t do it at my best so I wanted something that I could have — and that was getting a cut up the street. It’s very vain and small, but other people were being much more selfish than I was. Catholic guilt is forever. A little bit of me was like, I’m triflin’ but not as triflin’. I wanted to feel like a bad bitch, and that’s the best I could get in such a dire situation.
JP: In one essay, you dig into the political elite — Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Eric Adams — and the limits of symbolism. How representation for the sake of representation doesn’t generate progress in the way some people seem to think, and how minorities bear the disproportionate brunt of their failures. November is around the corner. How f—ed are we?
MA: I don’t really believe in polling but I did see that even if Trump is convicted he is still within the margin of error. It’s an old man and a criminal. I’m trying to not be disparaging. They’re both old but Trump is crazy, and crazy presents a certain energy. I think we’re f—ed. A few convictions might actually complicate the situation. Still, I don’t know.
There’s this conversation happening on why Biden is not getting credit for the economy. But then half of Americans say they can’t afford to pay rent. And it’s grossly underreported. A lot of people are very discouraged.
JP: More than we probably even realize.
MA: People are not being spoken to. And there is this arrogance to [how Biden operates]. Like, he won’t apologize for his role in the massive death of Palestinians. It’s indecent in and of itself. But it’s not politically expedient. Now he’s prone to losing Michigan and Georgia, and it comes off like he doesn’t even care. They keep telling Black people to be grateful. The whole stimulus check thing, for example. They keep telling us we’re misinformed. It’s condescending to working-class Black people, who are the majority of us.
Black people have a right to be disappointed and not happy that this 80-year-old man has not done as much as he claims to do. Some people wanted to shut down the police altogether. He said no, no, no — rock this police bill. He said, ‘Democracy is so important.’ But they didn’t pass that voting rights bill. Maybe it would have failed either way, but he didn’t exert that much public pressure. Now we’re supposed to be guilted into it. Barack and Michelle are gonna come wagging their fingers and say, ‘Hit Pookie, tell him to vote.’ Pookie got every right to be disenchanted. Maybe it’s not articulated the best way, but people have a right to be disappointed. People are suffering and those $1200 checks meant a lot because it was the first time in their life where they felt like the government actually put money in their pocket. And if you can’t understand that on a basic level, you are screwed.
“I wanted to feel like a bad bitch, and that’s the best I could get in such a dire situation.”
— Michael Arceneaux
JP: Is there just less empathy these days?
MA: I think so. I mention in the book about a friend, Brian, who passed away from brain cancer. I started waking up in the middle of the night because my sleep pattern was off. I now realize that was my grief. A week ago I woke up and heard that Nicki Minaj diss record, “Big Foot.” There’s a line about Megan [Thee Stallion] lying on her dead momma. Then the memes started. That’s what I mean. There is a level of depravity now that is a lot more casual than it should be.
JP: There’s been a noticeable shift in the national mood for sure. Almost like one world is ending and another is beginning.
MA: I’ve joked in TV meetings that it could be illegal to be gay in a year [laughs]. I have that on my mind. Being from Texas, and what’s happening there, Texas is very much a template with what [Republicans] want to do with the rest of the country. So when people say, ‘How can you live in this multicultural society and still live in repression,’ I’m like, well look at Houston, the most ethnically diverse city in the country.
JP: Things feel noticeably scarier than 2016.
MA: It does. Especially because of my skin and I hate slavery [laughs]. My only hope is that Trump is crazy and who knows what he will say. Crazy is not very reliable.
“I’m learning in grief that I am a different person,” says Arceneaux. “Part of that is rediscovering an actual love of writing.”
(Gabriel S. Lopez/For The Times)
Producer: Ashley Woeber
Grooming: Arielle Park
Photo Assistant: Alma Lucia
Styling Assistant: Ryan Phung
Location: Hollyhock House
Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a regular contributor to Image.
When John Lantigua, a retired journalist in Miami Beach, checked his email one recent morning, he was glad to see an invitation.
“It was like, ‘Come and share an evening with me. Click here for details,’” Mr. Lantigua said.
It appeared to be a Paperless Post invitation from someone he once worked with at The Palm Beach Post, a man who had left Florida for Mississippi and liked to arrange dinners when he was back in town.
Mr. Lantigua, 78, clicked the link. It didn’t open.
He clicked a second time. Still nothing.
He didn’t realize what was going on until a mutual friend who had received the same email told him it wasn’t an invitation at all. It was a scam.
Phishing scams have long tried to frighten people into clicking on links with emails claiming that their bank accounts have been hacked, or that they owe thousands of dollars in fines, or that their pornography viewing habits have been tracked.
The invitation scam is a little more subtle: It preys on the all-too-human desire to be included in social gatherings.
The phishy invitations mimic emails from Paperless Post, Evite and Punchbowl. What appears to be a friendly overture from someone you know is really a digital Trojan horse that gives scammers access to your personal information.
“I thought it was diabolical that they would choose somebody who has sent me a legitimate invitation before,” Mr. Lantigua said. “He’s a friend of mine. If he’s coming to town, I want to see him.”
Rachel Tobac, the chief executive of SocialProof Security, a cybersecurity firm, said she noticed the scam last holiday season.
“Phishing emails are not a new thing,” Ms. Tobac said, “but every six months, we get a new lure that hijacks our amygdala in new ways. There’s such a desire for folks to get together that this lure is interesting to people. They want to go to a party.”
Phishing scams involve “two distinct paths,” Ms. Tobac added. In one, the recipient is served a link that turns out to be dead, or so it seems. A click activates malware that runs silently as it gleans passwords and other bits of personal information. In all likelihood, this is what happened when Mr. Lantigua clicked on the ersatz invitation link.
Another scam offers a working link. Potential victims who click on it are asked to provide a password. Those who take that next step are a boon to hackers.
“They have complete control of your email and, in turn, your entire digital life,” Ms. Tobac said. “They can reset your password for your dog’s Instagram account. They can take over your bank account. Change your health insurance.”
Digital invitation platforms are trying to combat the scam by publishing guides on how to spot fake invitations. Paperless Post has also set up an email account — phishing@paperlesspost.com — for users to submit messages for verification. The company sends suspicious links to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a nonprofit that maintains a database monitored by cybersecurity firms. Flagged links are rendered ineffective.
The scammers’ new strategy of exploiting the desire for connection is infuriating, said Alexa Hirschfeld, a founder of Paperless Post. “Life can be isolating,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “When it looks like you’re getting an invitation from someone you know, your first instinct is excitement, not skepticism.”
Olivia Pollock, the vice president of brand for Evite, said that fake invitations tended to be generic, promising a birthday party or a celebration of life. Most invitations these days tend to have a specific focus — mahjong gatherings or book club talks, for instance. “The devil is in the details,” Ms. Pollock said.
Because scammers don’t know how close you are with the people in your contact list, fake invitations may also seem random. “They could be from your business school roommate you haven’t spoken to in 10 years,” Ms. Hirschfeld said.
Alyssa Williamson, who works in public relations in New York, was leaving a yoga class recently when she checked her phone and saw an invitation from a college classmate.
“I assumed it was an alumni event,” Ms. Williamson, 30, said. “I clicked on it, and it was like, ‘Enter your email.’ I didn’t even think about it.”
Later that day, she received texts from friends asking her about the party invitation she had just sent out. Her response: What party?
“The thing is, I host a lot of events,” she said. “Some knew it was fake. Others were like, ‘What’s this? I can’t open it.’”
Andrew Smith, a graduate student in finance who lives in Manhattan, received what looked like a Punchbowl invitation to “a memory making celebration.” It appeared to have come from a woman he had dated in college. He received it when he was having drinks at a bar on a Friday night — “a pretty insidious piece of timing,” he said.
“The choice of sender was super clever,” Mr. Smith, 29, noted. “This was somebody that would probably get a reaction from me.”
Mr. Smith seized on the phrase “memory making celebration” and filled in the blanks. He imagined that someone in his ex-girlfriend’s immediate family had died. Perhaps she wanted to restart contact at this difficult moment.
Something saved him when he clicked a link and tried to tap out his personal information — his inability to remember the password to his email account. The next day, he reached out to his ex, who confirmed that the invitation was fake.
“It didn’t trigger any alarm bells,” Mr. Smith said. “I went right for the click. I went completely animal brain.”
The new scam comes with an unfortunate side effect, a suspicion of invitations altogether. It’s enough to make a person antisocial.
“Don’t invite me to anything,” Mr. Lantigua, the retired journalist, said, only half-joking. “I’m not coming.”
You want to know where men’s fashion is heading? Follow the geeks.
These are the obsessives, fixated, with a NASA technician’s precision, on how their pants fit or on which pair of Paraboot shoes is the correct pair. These are the obsessives who in the aughts were early to selvage denim (now available at a Uniqlo near you!) and soft-shouldered Italian tailoring in the mode that, eventually, trickled down to your local J. Crew.
And where has the attention of this cohort landed now? On a vanguard of newish-to-the-West labels from Japan, like A.Presse, Comoli, Auralee and T.T.
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A.Presse is probably the most hyped of this cohort. What other label is worn by the French soccer player Pierre Kalulu and the actor Cooper Hoffman and has men paying a premium for a hoodie on the resale market? Kazuma Shigematsu, the founder, is not into attention. When we spoke, he wouldn’t allow me to record the conversation. Notes only.
“You mean a better-fitting denim jacket that’s based on an old Levi’s thing? Yeah, OK, sold,” said Jeremy Kirkland, host of the “Blamo!” podcast and the textbook definition of a latter-day Japanese men’s wear guy. Mr. Kirkland, once someone who would allocate his budget to Italian suits, admitted that, recently, over the course of two weeks, he bought four (yes, four) jackets from A.Presse1.
“I’m not really experimenting with my style anymore,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m just wanting really good, basic stuff.”
Basic though these clothes appear, their hook is that they’re opulent to the touch, elevated in their fabrication.
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Over the years, the designer Ryota Iwai has told me repeatedly that he is inspired by nothing more than the people he sees on his commute to the Auralee offices in Tokyo. When asked recently if he collected anything, he said nothing — just his bicycle.
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The true somber tale of this wave. The brand’s founder, Taiga Takahashi, died of an arrhythmia in 2022 at 27. The label has continued to plumb history for inspiration. The latest collection had pieces that drew on bygone American postal-worker uniforms.
An Auralee2 bomber looks pedestrian until you touch it and realize its silk. Labels like T.T3 make clothes that echo the specs of a vintage relic yet come factory fresh, notched up, made … well, better. They bestow upon the wearer a certain in-the-know authority.
And so there is a hobbyist giddiness present on Discord channels where 30- and 40-something men trade tips on how to size moleskin trousers by the Japanese label Comoli; at boutiques like Neighbour in Vancouver, British Columbia, where items like a $628 dusty pink trucker jacket from Yoko Sakamoto and an $820 T.T sweater sell out soon after hitting the sales floor.
What’s notable is how swiftly these geeky preferences have wiggled into the broader fashion community. While I was in Paris for the men’s fashion shows a year ago January, all anyone wanted to talk about were things with a “Made in Japan” tag. I would speak with editors who were carving out room in their suitcases for Auralee’s $3,000 leather jackets.
But these were clothes being shown away from the fashion week hordes. The A.Presse showroom was on a Marais side street in a space about as long as a bowling lane and scarcely wider that was crammed with racks of canvas, silk and denim jackets with Pollock-like paint splatters. There were leather jackets as plush as Roche Bobois sofas and hoodies based on sweatshirts made in America a half-century ago.
I got the hype. After 10 days of puzzling over newfangled stuff on the runways, the display of simple, understandable shapes we’ve known our whole lives, but redone with extra care, couldn’t have felt more welcome.
Kazuma Shigematsu, the A.Presse designer, said he had collected a trove of vintage pieces that he housed in a separate space to plumb for inspiration. He made new clothes based on old clothes that benefited from a century of small design tweaks.
By this January, A.Presse had upgraded to a regal maison facing the Place des Vosges, with giant windows and even more reverent hoodies, even more tender leathers. Back in America, I asked an online department store executive what his favorite thing from Paris was. He took out his phone to show me photos of himself trying on a zip-up leather jacket in A.Presse’s high-ceilinged showroom.
On Their Own Terms
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“We never think about trendiness or popular design details,” Ms. Sakamoto said through a translator. “It’s more like functionality, everyday use.” The label has a thing for natural dyes: pants stained with persimmon tannin, yellow ochre and sumi ink, shirts colored with mugwort and adzuki beans.
The sudden popularity of these labels outside Japan can make it feel as if they are new. Yet each label has built a respectable business within Japan, some for more than a decade. Auralee was founded in 2015. A year later, Yoko Sakamoto4 started its line. A.Presse is the relative baby of this cohort at five years old.
“A couple years ago, we would have to buy off the line sheet or go to Japan and see everything,” said Saager Dilawri, the owner of Neighbour, who has an instinct for what spendy, creative types lust after. “Now I think everyone from Japan is trying to go to Paris to get into the international market.”
This movement’s “Beatles on Ed Sullivan” moment occurred in 2018, when Auralee won the Fashion Prize of Tokyo, granting the designer, Ryota Iwai, financial support. Soon after, Auralee was given a slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar.
“I had never seen a show before, never thought to do it,” Mr. Iwai said through a translator in February, days after his latest runway show. He has now done five.
As we talked, buyers speaking different languages entered his storefront showroom and ventured upstairs to scrutinize items like a trench coat that looked as if it was made of corduroy but was actually made from cashmere and wool and an MA-1 bomber jacket with a feathery merino wool lining peeking out along the placket.
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The Cale designer Yuki Sato travels throughout Japan to find textiles. Unusually, the company manufactures everything, including leather and denim, in one factory.
At Cale’s5 display off Place Vendôme, the designer Yuki Sato described denim trousers and pocketed work jackets as “modest, but perfectionist.” On the other side of the city, at Soshi Otsuki, whose 11-year-old label Soshiotsuki has gained attention for its warped vision of salary-man suits, I encountered buyers from Kith, a New York streetwear emporium better known for selling logoed hoodies and sell-out sneakers than for tailoring.
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Nearly a decade into its existence, Soshiotsuki has hit a hot streak. Soshi Otsuki won the LVMH Prize in 2025, and he already has a Zara collaboration under his belt. An Asics collaboration is set to arrive in stores soon.
Talking through translators with these designers, I began to worry that it might be unfair to group them together simply because they were all from Japan. Auralee simmers with colors as lush as a Matisse canvas, while Comoli’s brightest shade is brown. Soshiotsuki6 has mastered tailoring, while Orslow is known for its faded-at-the-knee jeans channeling decades-old Levi’s.
Rather, as with the Antwerp Six design clique that sprung out of Belgium in the early 1980s, it is these labels’ origin stories that thread them together.
“They’re being encountered on their own terms and respected on their own account, and they happen to be Japanese,” said W. David Marx, the author of “Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style” and a cultural critic who has lived in Tokyo for more than two decades.
“It is a new era of Japanese fashion on the global stage,” Mr. Marx said.
A Love Affair With Japan
Western shoppers have a history of falling hard for clothes from Japan. In 1981, when Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto crashed onto the Paris fashion scene, buyers swooned for their brainy, body-shrouding creations.
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Recently reintroduced as Number(N)ine by Takahiro Miyashita.
Years later, Number(N)ine7 and A Bathing Ape synthesized trends we would call American — grunge, streetwear and hip-hop — polished them up and sold them back to the West.
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Years before American men were trawling the internet for A.Presse, they would scour forums for deals on Visvim’s jeans and sneakers. Today, Visvim has stores in Santa Fe, N.M.; Carmel, Calif.; and Los Angeles.
Into the 2000s, clothing geeks were swapping tips on forums like Superfuture and Hypebeast about how to use a Japanese proxy service to buy Visvim’s8 seven-eyelet leather work boots or SugarCane’s brick-thick jeans.
Along the way, “Made in Japan” became a shorthand for “made well.” This was more than fetishization. As America’s clothing factories became empty carcasses pockmarking the heartland, Japan’s apparel industry grew steroidal.
“Japan still has an incredible manufacturing base for apparel that goes all the way from the textiles to the sewing to the postproduction,” Mr. Marx said.
Today, many Japanese labels produce most of their garments and, crucially, their textiles in Japan. When I first met Mr. Iwai years ago, I asked how he managed to create such lush colors. He answered, as if noting that the sky was blue, that he worked with the factories that developed his fabrics. As I spoke with Mr. Sato in January, he shared that Cale’s factory had been in his family for generations and also produced for other Japanese brands that I would know.
Chris Green, the owner of Ven. Space, a boutique in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn that has helped to introduce a number of these labels to an American market, suggested that because Japan is a small country with a fervent fashion culture, a competitive spirit has been stoked.
“They have to be able to cut through the noise,” Mr. Green said, with brands trying to prove that their cashmere sweater can outclass their peers’, that their silks are sourced from finer factories. What’s more, he said, once these brands have nailed a design, they stick with it. That is something that is important to men, in particular, who hate when a brand abandons its favored pants after a season.
Before he opened Ven. Space in 2024, Mr. Green was an admirer of many of these labels, purchasing them during trips to Japan. As we spoke, he was wearing a pair of Comoli belted jeans that he bought five or so years ago. A similar style is still available.
Primed for What They Were Pitching
At the close of the 2010s, streetwear was running on fumes. Quiet luxury was entering at stage left. If the Row and Loro Piana were expert at subtle, fine-to-the-touch clothes, so, too, were the likes of T.T, Graphpaper and Yoko Sakamoto.
“I went from this guy that wears pear-shaped pants to just wearing, like, a denim jacket,” said Chris Maradiaga, a tech worker and freelance writer in Vancouver. His wardrobe today consists of Comoli’s black-as-night trousers and a purple-tinged coat by Ssstein. His kaleidoscopic Bode jackets gather dust.
That Ssstein clothes have landed in the closets of men on the other side of the world defies the early guidance relayed to Kiichiro Asakawa, the label’s bushy-haired designer. His “senpais,” or mentors, warned him that his reduced designs might leave Western audiences cold. “You need something powerful,” they told him.
He tried, but it wasn’t necessary. It’s the most minimal designs — his cotton gabardine zip-ups, his “easy” pleated trousers — that people are most interested in now. “It actually makes me very happy,” he said through a translator. “My instincts were right.” Mr. Asakawa won the Fashion Prize of Tokyo in 2024.
Adapting to North American Markets (and Men)
Several Japanese designers noted that they had modified their sizing to accommodate larger, American bodies.
“I’ll ask them, Can you lengthen the pants by three centimeters? Because you need that for the Western market,” Mr. Dilawri of Neighbour said, noting that the designers were receptive to those requests.
A number of labels, like Comoli and Soshiotsuki, are already oversize. That’s the look.
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Kiichiro Asakawa ran a Tokyo boutique, Carol, before starting Ssstein in 2016. It’s still there. He, too, said he found inspiration in the everyday, for example when watching an elderly couple have dinner across a restaurant.
There is also the matter of price. On the whole, these clothes are not cheap. See Auralee’s silk bomber jacket, which could be military surplus but feels stolen from a sultan’s palace. It’s roughly $1,700. Ssstein’s9 Carhartt cousin chore jacket with a cowhide collar and a factory-massaged fade? About $1,000. Anyone who has traveled recently in Japan, where the yen is tantalizingly weak, will tell you that these Japanese-made clothes, after being imported, are far pricier in North America.
Yet, as luxury fashion labels continue to price out the aspirational middle-class shopper, many of those same shoppers have convinced themselves that the Japanese labels are a better value. A cashmere coat at Prada is $10,000, and you’ll need $1,690 to own a cotton-blend cardigan from Margiela. Similar pieces from Japanese labels can be half that price, or less.
“Brands like Bottega, Balenciaga, the Row — all that stuff — are so unobtainable,” said Mr. Kirkland, whose clothing budget has shifted to A.Presse. “I will never be in that price bracket,” he added, “but I’m wealthy enough to buy a chore coat for $800.”
Of course, Mr. Kirkland and all of the fans of these labels could own a chore coat for far less — but then it wouldn’t be “Made in Japan.”
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