Lifestyle
Avoiding your problems with work? You might have “high-functioning” depression
Judith Joseph has spent most of her life building an impressive résumé. She is a board-certified psychiatrist, chair of the Women in Medicine Initiative for Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, the principal investigator of her own research lab — and a mom.
But despite her accolades, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Joseph couldn’t shake the sense that something was off. With the world on lockdown, Joseph began sharing skits related to her research on social media, many of which went viral. It was only then that she landed on a name to what she, and many others, had been experiencing: high-functioning depression.
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.
“I wanted to make sure that we weren’t just thinking about depression in the way that our grandmothers think of depression, not being able to get out of bed, crying,” Joseph said.
Instead, with high-functioning depression “you push through and you don’t deal with your pain because too many people depend on you,” she said. “You know something’s off, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. And you don’t slow down because you don’t know how to.”
To Joseph’s surprise, high-functioning depression was absent in medical literature. So she set out to design and execute the first research study on the topic, which published in February. Her first book, “High Functioning: Overcome Your Hidden Depression and Find Your Joy” (Little, Brown Spark), relies on findings from the study, anecdotes from patients from her private practice and lessons from her life to teach people how to understand the science of their sadness, so they can understand the science of their happiness.
The Times spoke with Joseph about her book’s findings and why it’s just as important to practice preventative care in mental health as it is in physical health.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Dr. Judith Joseph is the author of “High Functioning: Overcome Your Hidden Depression and Reclaim Your Joy.” (Little, Brown Spark) (Photo by Anthony Steverson)
How would you define high–functioning depression?
With clinical depression, you have five or more symptoms, like low appetite, change in appetite, poor sleep, low energy, feeling restless, guilt, hopelessness, suicidal ideation. But you also have to meet criteria for having a low mood, or anhedonia. And on top of all that, you have to have lower functioning or significant distress.
People with high-functioning depression will have the symptoms of depression, but they’re not low-functioning. In fact, they cope by over-functioning, and they don’t acknowledge having significant distress. In fact, they’re muted. They don’t feel anything.
One of the symptoms of trauma is avoidance. So people think, “OK, I don’t want to go to this place or see this person or be in this situation because it triggers me.” But with high-functioning depression, people are avoiding by busying themselves so they don’t have time to feel, and when they sit still, they feel restless and empty.
A big part of high–functioning depression is being defined by your achievements or what you do for others. Why is it so hard to build identity outside of our external achievements?
Many of us have this coping mechanism of forgetting, and that’s one of the 30-plus symptoms of the trauma inventory. We outrun because we don’t remember what it was like to derive a sense of pleasure from things that truly bring us joy, because our past hides them.
Children, if there’s a conflict, they internalize it and they’ll say, “Well, if I only got straight A’s, Daddy wouldn’t have left.” Or “If I only did my homework, the dog wouldn’t have died.” Children use that magical thinking, but adults use it too. They focus on things like work, a role, on what they can do. In the short run, that’s a positive coping skill, but in the long run, when you continue to intellectualize and you don’t feel, that can show in different ways like binge drinking, excessive shopping, excessive doomscrolling, physical breakdowns or even dipping into low-function depression.
The bottom line is that there is a real value in acknowledging and processing your trauma and healing, because then you can actually experience a change.
“People can search and try to be happy all their lives and never get it. And even if you get the thing you think will make you happy, you’re still not happy. If you shift it, and you’re like, ‘I can increase my points of joy every day,’ then it’s attainable.”
— Dr. Judith Joseph
In the first part of your book, you introduce two key terms: anhedonia and masochism. What is anhedonia and why is it important for people to know what it is?
There’s a real disconnect between the research and the real world, because in research, anhedonia is all over our rating scales. It’s a term that has been around in the medical literature for hundreds of years. “An” is a lack, “hed” is pleasure, and “onia” is a symptom. “Anhedonia” is a lack of pleasure and joy, and it’s a lack of pleasure and joy in things you were once interested in.
So imagine you’re eating your favorite meal and you’re not even tasting it, you’re not savoring it. Or if you are listening to your favorite song, and it doesn’t move your body the way it used to, it doesn’t light you up. Or if you’re looking at a beautiful part of nature, like the sun is setting and it’s exquisite, and you’re just checked out. Or if you’re with your partner, and you’re being intimate and you just want to rush through it; you’re not even in the moment. These are all the simple joys that make life worth living.
In research, you will rarely see the word “happy” on our rating scales, but what you do see are points of joy. Whereas in the real world, the patient will come in and say, “I just want to be happy.” But we’re like, “No, we’re just trying to eradicate your depression by increasing your points of joy.”
Happiness is an idea, whereas joy is an experience. If you can reframe that and think about it as: Anhedonia is robbing [me] of my joy; it’s not that I have to be depressed and weepy and sad, but if my points of joy are low, then that’s an indication that something is off.
It’s a really important shift because people can search and try to be happy all their lives and never get it. And even if you get the thing you think will make you happy, you’re still not happy. If you shift it, and you’re like, I can increase my points of joy every day, then it’s attainable. There’s hope. Today, you may get two points, but tomorrow maybe you get three.
How does masochism contribute to high–functioning depression?
When people think of masochism in the real world, they think of sex, which is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about masochistic personality disorder. Masochistic traits are ones where people tend to bend over backward for others. They tend to sacrifice their joy for the sake of others. It’s almost like self-sabotaging. In today’s speak, it’s called people-pleasing.
What I found in my study was that a lot of people who are caregivers have high rates of anhedonia. Well, that makes sense. These are people who are not thinking about themselves. They’re putting others first, often at the expense of their own happiness. Because high-functioning depression is closely tied to trauma, and because a symptom of trauma is low self-worth and shame and self-blame, that may be a part of the reason why people with high-functioning depression can’t relax: They’re constantly doing for others.
If you’re someone who knows your self-worth and you know that your role doesn’t define you, you’re not going to bend over backward. You’re not going to keep going, even though you feel off and you feel burned out. You’re going to take care of yourself.
The second half of the book gives the reader concrete steps to reclaim their joy using what you call the Five V’s: validation, venting, values, vitals and vision. How did you develop these five Vs?
If you think about it, there’s been this renaissance in physical health, but there’s nothing for us in mental health. Why do we wait to check that box of low-functioning? We need to show people how to increase their points of joy and prevent these breakdowns on their own.
So, I came up with the five Vs based on what I learned about happiness and research, and derived them based off of things that I felt that people needed to do in order to overcome trauma and how to find sustainable joy.
Validation is the first step. Because many people, again, don’t acknowledge how they feel. They push through pain, they just get through life, and that’s how they cope. But if you can acknowledge how you feel, and accept how you feel, then you could actually do something about it.
Venting is expressing your emotions. Some of my clients are neurodivergent, so they’re not the most verbally expressive. But there are other ways you can vent. You can draw, you can write, you can pray, you can sing. You could talk about your feelings, if that’s how you want to express it. You can cry. Venting has different ways of getting that emotion out and decreasing your stress.
Values are things that, when you tap into them, you feel a sense of purpose and meaning. I would say that values are things that are priceless. Many of us with high-functioning depression, we’re chasing the accolades, and we’re chasing the things that look good on the outside but don’t really give us true meaning.
With Vitals, I wanted to put in the traditional things like sleep, movement and diet, which are all important. But I also wanted to add things like our relationship to technology, our relationships with other people and work-life balance, because the quality of our relationships with people in our lives is the No. 1 predictor of long-term happiness and health.
Vision is how do you plan joy so that you keep moving forward instead of getting stuck in the past? Celebrating your wins so you don’t have to live for tomorrow’s. Start planning joy today. That’s the whole point. Don’t hold your breath for happiness for the future.
(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)
For someone who’s avoidant, it can be really scary to slow down enough to really examine your interior life. What do you say to that person who doesn’t know how to broach the five Vs?
I always say don’t do the five Vs all at once, because people who are intense like myself will want to do everything at once. The goal is not to use all five at once; use one or two. I would say start with validation. It doesn’t have to be this big, grand thing. It could be as simple as looking in the mirror every day and just reflecting on how you feel. Or, if that’s too intense for you, there’s sensory tools like a 5-4-3-2-1 method that is a grounding tool that allows you to be present in your body. Just practice that every day for one to two minutes and, slowly, you should be able to start to self-reflect and acknowledge and accept what you’re feeling and move from there.
You directly tied the idea of “vision” to fostering joy and combating anhedonia. What’s the relationship between vision and anhedonia?
People with high-functioning depression want to keep doing what they’re good at. But it’s important to retrain your brain and slowly reintroduce yourself to the things that you once enjoyed.
For example, in the book I talk about a patient who forgot that they actually enjoyed nature. When they were a child, their parents used to take them camping and when the parents got divorced, they stopped going camping, and they forgot that that’s what they love doing. Now they live in a big city and what they usually do for fun is go see a show or something that is more accessible in a city. But when we identified that trauma, we started to challenge them to go back into nature again. By slowly introducing the person back to the things that they used to like, their anhedonia in relation to nature got better.
TAKEAWAYS
from “High Functioning”
At the end of the book you break down the various types of therapy and drug interventions for someone struggling with their mental health. For someone who has your book in hand and is looking for next steps, what would you recommend them?
I’d recommend for them to take the quizzes [throughout the book] and to see where they are in terms of the levels of anhedonia, depression and trauma and then move from there.
Let’s say, biologically, you’re healthy and psychologically you don’t have very many risk factors. Then you have to work on the social aspect. What is it about you that’s keeping you in that toxic environment? What’s hindering you from leaving there? Because that’s where you’re losing joy.
For another individual, it could be that the social bucket is fine. The psychological bucket is fine. But biologically, maybe there’s an untreated autoimmune issue, or maybe you’re going through perimenopause. Well, then that’s where you need to focus on the science of your happiness.
For others who have trauma that’s never been processed, and they’re constantly in fight or flight, but biologically and socially, things are not as draining for them, then that’s where we need to focus.
There is only ever going to be one you in the history of the universe and in the future of the universe. That, to me, is so powerful because then you know that you’re here for a reason.
So I want people who read this book to really try to understand the science of your happiness, because there’s only one you. And then when you fully understand what’s draining from your happiness, then you can work on those efforts to increase your joy, using the book as a guide.
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.
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.
1
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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New Hampshire17 minutes agoN.H. lawmakers to vote on increasing tolls, civil rights, and k-12 education – The Boston Globe
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New Jersey23 minutes agoWhen do hummingbirds return? See the migration map
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New Mexico29 minutes agoState Police investigate shooting involving US marshals in Deming
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North Carolina35 minutes ago
Halifax County man wins $209 million in Powerball drawing
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North Dakota41 minutes agoNorth Dakota Lands All-Conference ATH Brady Lee Out of Wisconsin
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Ohio47 minutes agoNew mail-in ballot deadline as Ohio changes impact primary election