Lifestyle
Beyond Erewhon: Inside the L.A. grocery store where all the cool vegans are flocking
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in late March, a block of East Hollywood is unusually quiet but for the corner of Fountain Avenue and North Edgemont Street. There, a line snakes halfway around the perimeter of a little vegan grocery store that’s sparking with activity.
Inside, grime music blasts as a pop-up vendor doles out vegan banh mi to shoppers who clutch bamboo toilet paper and vegan lox. Even a Siberian husky named Chaka gets in on the action, scarfing up a vegan dog treat — every canine who comes through the door gets one.
“Welcome!” yells Matt Fontana, the store’s tattoo-sleeved co-founder.
The Besties store after its run club event, which always ends with free soft serve for all.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Besties sells a wide array of vegan jerky.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“Hey Paul, hi!” Fontana bellows in his New York accent, while filling a cup with the store’s vegan soft serve ice cream for another customer. Then, waving his free arm: “Everyone, you guys — come on in!”
It’s a typical day at Besties Vegan Paradise. Since opening in 2019, the grocery store has become a hub for a particular type of cool vegan in Los Angeles. The clientele is culturally diverse, spanning age, gender and style. But it coalesces around especially trendy aesthetics and a staunch desire to live responsibly.
Environmentally conscious, animal-loving DJs, chefs, writers, filmmakers, graphic designers and other creatives mingle there over free natural wine and vegan Brie during a “meet the maker” session, showcasing how the store’s cheese is made. “Open forum” talks there address topics such as environmental sustainability and the food chain. As you grab a beverage out of the cooler, hand-painted lettering above proclaims you’re “So Cool You Hot.”
There are other vegan markets in L.A. — X Market in Venice and Glowing Plant Based Eatery & Market in Echo Park, among them. But Besties is the only one that sources 100% of its products from all-vegan manufacturers so that customers don’t have to scrutinize labels. And while the store’s purpose is utilitarian, Besties is as much about the vibes — the shopping experience and connections made while there — as it is about picking up a fresh bottle of plant milk for your morning cereal. Customers trade tips about vegan tattoo ink during Wu-Tang Wednesdays, which Besties observes with religious fervor. (Every Wednesday, Wu-Tang Clan’s hip-hop plays loudly and on repeat in the store from opening until closing.) Over the last five years, the establishment has grown beyond the parameters of a retail store and into a cultural center for vegans in L.A. focused on food, fashion, art and athleticism.
Fontana, who sports a shaved head and a gold tooth, and co-owner Asia Rain, a vegan tattoo artist whose studio is above the store, host these in-person events at Besties to give like-minded customers a space to socialize and vegan-curious newcomers a place to learn about the diet. Pop-ups supporting local vegan brands, such as Tiffany Luong’s Long Beach-based Vegan Bánh Mì Thảo, are a regular occurrence. Besties makes its own chocolate, candies and cheese — “celebratory foods people are emotionally attached to,” Fontana said. Rain also designs a line of street-inspired branded hoodies, T-shirts and socks that come in handy at the store’s popular weekly, vegan 5K run club that ends at Besties with free soft serve for all.
“Veganism isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle and a mind-set,” Fontana said. “It’s an act of love.”
Veganism has come a long way from the days of limp soy hot dogs. In 1971, author Frances Moore Lappé published “Diet for a Small Planet,” a seminal guide that argued Americans’ insatiable appetite for meat was damaging Earth — and our bodies. Soon after, meatless diets gained popularity among a small percentage of Americans. But it wasn’t until the early 1980s that soy became a more common replacement for animal-based proteins such as meat and dairy, standing in for burgers, ice cream and other American comfort foods. Restaurants and grocery stores now offer shockingly sophisticated and culturally diverse items. But veganism still suffers from something of a branding issue: It’s often seen as an exclusive, hippie-ish club of well-meaning but judgy disciples, with restrictive diets, who can afford $42 artisanal vegan salami. “People ask me if I miss meat or dairy,” Julio Torres says while discussing his veganism in a 2017 Comedy Central stand-up show. “I mean, I miss being liked.”
Part of Besties’ mission is rebranding veganism as something that’s diverse, inclusive and, yes, even hip.
A patron shows off a “Besties” thigh tattoo from Asia Rain. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Cesar Asebedo enjoys a vegan ice cream cone. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The Vegan Run Club in action.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s for everyone: goths, punk rockers, hippies, bike messengers, basics,” Fontana said. “Hip-hop heads and normcore hikers and campers. Veganism is small, but it crosses all identities. It’s for anyone who truly champions equality, who realizes they have a chance to make a difference in real time.”
The charge Fontana is leading has been shared by a handful of other vegan outposts in the U.S., according to Alicia Kennedy, author of 2023’s “No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating.” She notes food destinations with similar “hip, young, vegan identities,” such as Williamsburg’s Foodswings (which closed in 2014), the Chicago Diner and Philadelphia’s Grindcore House.
Collectively, these spaces are valuable, she says, because vegans, historically, have always been far more diverse than the dominant cultural stereotype: “This white, crunchy, kind of angry activist vibe,” Kennedy said. “Has it changed? Not really. So anything that pushes back against that is going to help change the mainstream perspective.”
On a recent Friday night, Besties hosted a lively vegan Mexican street food event, featuring Jessie Gil’s Sylmar-based pop-up El Compa Vegano, that drew more than 150 people over four hours. Straight-edge 20-somethings, with nose rings and decorative tooth gems, mingled with middle-aged “basics” in jeans and unisex button-down shirts outside the store. Carne asada, with impeccably seasoned lion’s mane mushrooms standing in for steak, sizzled on the grill as plumes of smoke filled the air. Some customers sat on a custom skateboard obstacle that doubles as a Brooklyn-style “stoop” outside Besties’ front door. (The shop lends it to local skater kids.) Hand-painted signs designed by Rain hung in the window, advertising “Classic Hot Dog $6.96” and “Oat Based Soft Serve” in the style of a 1950s soda fountain. It was a mashup of crowds from the Venice Beach Skatepark, the KITH streetwear store in Beverly Hills and the Smorgasburg food market.
Vegan carne asada, carnitas, al pastor and pollo tacos from El Compa Vegano.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
“The reason this place feels so authentic is because they’re making healthy choices for themselves — they’re walking the walk — but they’re cool kids too, and that makes it realistic. You can do it too,” said Besties customer D’Andrée Galipeau, a DJ who lives nearby and “leans vegan.”
Fontana, 48, grew up in a Sicilian-American family in Brooklyn in the 1970s and ’80s immersed in the hip-hop culture of the time. “Anything anti-establishment,” he says. He collected basketball sneakers and tattoos, and carried his skateboard everywhere. His mother was a vegetarian and he, an animal lover, followed suit at 14. He turned vegan at 20 when — while studying eastern philosophy and religion at San Francisco State University — he met his now ex-wife and she taught him about the diet.
“I hadn’t seen behind the veil,” he said. “I didn’t know about the industrialized animal agriculture industry, the enslavement of millions of female animals across the world,” the latter referring to the dairy industry. “Once all of that got explained to me, it was an obvious choice as somebody who rejects violence, rejects oppression and is a champion of reproductive freedom.”
Fontana went on to become an influential streetwear, sneaker and hip-hop fashion entrepreneur in the early to mid-2000s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The cultural influences of his past are apparent at Besties. The store creates “limited-edition” soft serve flavors to match its calendar of food pop-ups. The Besties hot dogs pay homage to the Coney Island of Fontana’s youth, the soft serve to the Carvel ice cream he grew up with.
Asia Rain serves up vegan ice cream. Matt Fontana holds their Maltese mix, MacKenzie, in the background.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s got to be lighthearted,” Fontana said of making veganism appealing. “We’re elevating veganism to be something that’s culturally aspirational as opposed to something that’s frowned upon by society.”
If Fontana is the mouthpiece of Besties, Rain, 34, is the artistic eye. She was born Asia Rain Phoenix (her last name is one her parents invented for their kids, and she goes by her first and middle name now). She spent her early years in Victoria, British Columbia, with parents who battled addictions, she says, and took odd jobs.
When Rain was 10, her parents moved her and her two younger siblings to Atlanta. They were undocumented immigrants, so when the kids got older, they couldn’t open a bank account, get a driver’s license or apply for financial scholarships.
Rain left home at 17 and spent a year traveling around the U.S. as a carnival barker (“Step right up!” she demonstrated) and airbrushing T-shirts at fairs and in malls. That led to work in an Indiana tattoo shop. She received her citizenship at 24, at which point she’d built a thriving clientele in the Midwest.
For the first time, she had a steady income. She bought a house with her partner, grew her own food, kept bees. But she felt stagnant and depressed. She gave it all up in 2016 and traveled to Peru, where she spent six months hiking and studying the culture, Spanish and the natural environment, including how to make tattoo ink from fruit.
When she returned to the U.S. in 2017, she met Fontana through a fine art tattooer. Through their conversations, Rain quickly decided to go vegan.
“Everywhere I looked it was … government manipulation and disrespect of natural resources,” she said. “And I felt powerless. Veganism is an act of choice to abstain from committing cruelty to anything. And that’s what I wanted to do.”
Ash Williams, left, Addison Blue and Nicolette Brannan enjoy free vegan soft serve after their weekly run.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
While dating over the next year or so — he living in L.A. and she in Vancouver — Fontana shared multiple business plans with Rain, including one for a vegan 7-Eleven-type store. He invited her to be his partner. Then things progressed rapidly.
Fontana sold almost everything he owned, put the rest in storage and lived out of his car — a black Jaguar — for several months in late 2018. Rain sold her beloved, baby blue VW Westfalia and moved to L.A. They lived in an Airbnb while they remodeled a former mini-mart. In January 2019, they opened Besties, where she now tattoos many of the customers.
Rain came up with the name: “If we all treated each other like besties, the world wouldn’t be in the state that it’s in,” she said.
For both Rain and Fontana, cool cachet and social-environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Besties might dress up the vegan lifestyle in trendy clothing and designer sneakers, but it still demands from them rigorous research, unwavering commitment, attention to detail and relentless principle.
“There’s Besties Vegan Paradise, the cultural center — and it says ‘All are welcome’ on the door,” Fontana said. “But personally, I’m a vegan activist. This place is my activism.”
Helping plant-based brands connect with customers is central to Besties’ mission. Most businesses charge pop-up vendors for space or take a percentage of their sales from events, Fontana said. Besties does neither.
Jessie Gil, founder of El Compa Vegano, holds vegan nachos, fully loaded. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Julie Reyes shops for groceries at Besties Vegan Paradise. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
“They do a great job of marketing me in their newsletters and on social media,” Luong said of Besties during her bánh mì event (she’s done 10 there now). “I feel supported, I feel seen.”
What does Besties get out of giving away space and time for free?
“Traffic,” Fontana said. “These pop-ups have followings that they bring to us. But it’s also part of how we’re breaking down the stereotypes of veganism, that ‘not for you’ club. These vendors showcase what’s usually the food from their culture and they bring with them a totally different community than maybe we’re able to reach directly.”
Fontana said one family even comes in every Saturday from Aliso Viejo for the soft serve.
The secret recipe took about three years to perfect, as Fontana and Rain experimented with coconut milk and soy milk for its base. (It’s now made with oat milk.) Ultimately, it was Rain’s mechanical expertise that made the difference. She took apart Besties’ large Taylor soft serve machine and adjusted it to dispense nondairy milk. “Changing the viscosity changes how you experience the flavor,” she said.
Vegan runners at Besties after their 5K run.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The store gives away soft serve to customers and vendors so readily that some question the business model.
“A friend of mine was like, ‘What’s the perk of them giving away all this stuff for free?’” said Sara Schunck, a member of Besties’ run club. “But the best people come out and you’re looking forward to the ice cream at the end. I’ve met a lot of really cool people.”
Fontana, now sitting on the skateboard-stoop outside the store, pops a vegan sour gummy into his mouth, contemplating the question.
“It’s about spreading the vegan love, paying it forward,” he said.
One vegan ice cream scoop at a time.
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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