Lifestyle
I've been married 13 years. Why is vacation sex suddenly so fleeting?
A funny thing happened almost a decade ago when I told my girlfriends that I was embarking on a two-week anniversary trip with my husband. Eyebrows were raised. One friend shook her head and said, “That would quickly become problematic.” Another said she never goes on vacation solely with her husband anymore because they always fight or he is “too needy sexually.” Still another told me I was brave because that was “too long,” and buried issues would start to rear their ugly heads. And these were the “happy couples” in my friend group!
I was intrigued by their reaction. When did we all start dodging our long-term partners? Was this another midlife obstacle that I had yet to confront? And was I going to experience it firsthand on this getaway with my husband?
The dynamic my friends were describing “is extremely common,” says Evans Wittenberg, a licensed marriage family therapist based in Los Feliz. “Vacations are a culturally sanctioned time to unwind, but the pressure to enjoy often backfires — especially in the bedroom. You cannot schedule desire, it much prefers breaking the rules rather than following them.”
My husband Rob and I have always bonded over a shared love of travel. We’ve loved exploring far-flung places, like Cambodia and Bora Bora, over nearly two decades together. How bad could it be?
With my friends’ voices in my head, we embarked on our journey to New Zealand in 2016. The plan was to spend a few days with my relatives who were living there and the rest of the time exploring a couple of lodges. We hadn’t slept well on the flight, and as soon as we landed, we had to be alert and drive on what felt like the wrong side of the road for four hours to our first stop. Amid the fog of jet lag, the squabbles began.
Why was it that despite our beautiful surroundings and swanky hotel rooms we couldn’t find a way to relax together?
First came the bickering over directions. Rob said my tone was edgy, and I thought the same about him. I often have strong opinions about where we should go and how, and he thinks my questioning him represents a lack of trust or that he can’t handle the task at hand. Much of our time spent navigating the lush green backroads of New Zealand was tense. Rob ignored me and blasted U2 at a volume he knew would make me nuts.
When we got to our destination, another point of disagreement came up: What to do that day. Rob wanted to bike ride. I wanted to spend our time exploring the parks along the Waikato River on foot. Luckily we were able to agree on exploring some thermal hot springs.
Finally, there was the question of intimacy. How much sex were we having — and when were we having it? When we arrived at the hotel, we upgraded to an even nicer, more expensive suite. Implicit in its price tag was the expectation that we’d have a fantastic time to justify it. Rob didn’t skip a beat getting into vacation mode and was keen to get the party started, while I needed a moment to shake off my fatigue and transition into feeling romantic. Our sex drives didn’t naturally sync up on that trip like they usually do and it bubbled up into a big, cranky fight leaving both of us feeling exhausted and miserable.
Rob likes to point out that in the early days of our relationship, when we went on our very first vacation, we’d have sex multiple times a day. It’s a benchmark he wishes we could revisit.
By the end of our trip, we were a bit sick of each other, and my girlfriends were proved right. Why was it that despite our beautiful surroundings and swanky hotel rooms we couldn’t find a way to relax together?
After New Zealand, we both agreed we should rethink how we traveled as a couple. We weren’t having as much fun as we could be. So we joined a travel group that offered curated activities to lessen the stress that comes with designing the trip ourselves. In the fall of 2019, we went on a weeklong vacation to Dubrovnik and Montenegro with a full agenda of boating excursions and hikes through vineyards with the hope that being surrounded by chatty fellow travelers and gorgeous sights would relieve some of the pressure to be everything for each other.
The hectic pace was a challenge for me. As an introvert, having a full schedule and breakfast, lunch and dinner with 20 strangers felt like a strain, despite how lovely the company was. But Rob seemed to be keeping up just fine. Toward the end, I was craving a day to relax at the hotel. But that day there was a kayaking adventure in Skadar Lake that would require three hours roundtrip in a van. It was more Rob’s thing than mine, and I encouraged him to go without me so I could have a day to myself.
Somehow this suggestion got lost in translation, and was processed as “Stay at the hotel with me so we can have sex all day!” That breakdown in communication kicked off one of the worst fights of our marriage. I felt boxed in; unable to take care of both of our needs at the same time. I needed to look after myself but couldn’t communicate that desire without it leading to a fight. Exhausted, backed into a wall and not seeing how we could move forward, I was mentally prepared to fly home alone the next day.
That night, as Rob engaged with everyone at the dinner but me, I comforted myself with a basket of bread rolls and thought about how we used to relish every minute together. We were one of those couples who clearly delighted in each other; other people would remark on our physical connection and say things like, “Come on you guys, you’re making us look bad.”
After dessert, with Rob still engrossed in conversation, I left the group, walked around the hotel grounds and found a quiet, deserted pool at the edge of a steep cliff. I peeled off my dress and had a solo late-night swim.
In earlier years, he would have come looking for me. I texted him and asked him to join me at the pool but unbeknownst to me he had left his phone in the room. I figured he was ignoring me. My stomach roiled from the stress. As the waves crashed cinematically on the rocks below, I thought that if we couldn’t get along in such a dreamy setting, then maybe it was an indication that we shouldn’t be together.
Exhausted, backed into a wall and not seeing how we could move forward, I was mentally prepared to fly home alone the next day.
I was also aware that my instincts might be mirroring those of my mother. She chose not to marry my father and raised me alone. There were only short-term partners until she finally walked down the aisle with my stepfather when I was 17. Sometimes I felt like the only thing I learned how to do in a relationship was leave.
For the next day, as I wrestled with whether to stay or to go, I contemplated my mother’s influence. I had inherited her avoidant tendencies and that urge to pull away, to run. Sticking around to resolve the fight might’ve been harder but would also be far more rewarding. I resolved to stay and see if we could work through it.
And we did. There might have been some makeup sex involved.
For a while after that, our solution was to not go away together at all — a decision only bolstered by the COVID-19 pandemic. We finally dipped our toes back into traveling in 2021. Still wary of our tendency to fight on vacation, we started off with three- or four-day trips, nothing too far or too taxing. They went well, but I was unsure about taking a bigger plunge. And I worried disagreements over sex would pop up again.
Eventually I sought out the advice of Kiana Reeves, an Ojai-based teacher of embodiment and intimacy. She put many of the feelings I’d been having around expectations into words.
“When stakes feel high everything goes sideways,” Reeves says. “We experience it as pressure, and pressure is a great libido killer, it’s a great intimacy killer and it often puts us in a position where we are blaming the other person for our feelings of pressure or not getting our needs met.”
The whole point of vacation is to relax and bring play into our lives, Reeves reminded me, noting that “libido thrives” in exactly those situations. She recommended that couples feeling vacation stress take the emphasis off sex and focus on connection, then “spend time making out, massage each other or lovingly touch each other. And see what happens from there.”
After trying a painful but productive couples retreat in Northern California, and even a few blissful guided healing sessions, we’ve focused in on Reeves’ advice to relax more, to be less hurried and to trust in our connection. It’s helping. I’ve nurtured a new appreciation for Rob; how giving he is, how much he strives to please me.
As for our differing appetites for activity, when one of us wants to go on a trip that appeals to only their personal interest, we find the right travel companions for the occasion. He does ski or boat trips with his buddies or his kids, while I might go visit my daughter at college or relatives in Australia. That way, we get to miss each other and feel fulfilled in our individual pursuits as well. When I’m excited about my own life, I’m more playful, curious and fun to be with. This approach has revitalized our relationship.
I don’t wing it and hope everything will turn out OK anymore. I communicate. Once I started verbalizing my need for alone time, and stopped tiptoeing around his feelings, I found that our relationship started to improve — both on vacations and in day-to-day life too. I got comfortable owning that I’m an introvert and being with a large group 24/7 or even just with my husband for every minute of the day is a lot for me. It’s no reflection on my feelings for him; it’s the way I’m built. We agreed in advance that I’ll tell him if I need to skip a group dinner or an activity to unwind and he now better understands why that’s important to me.
We still kick this subject of sex on vacation around a lot. Ignoring it gets in the way of an authentic connection. Not always comparing this version of us with earlier versions helps. When Rob gets nostalgic for our former sex life, I remind him that we’re now dealing with older, less compliant bodies. I’ve gone my rounds with perimenopause and menopause and he’s had his own battles with aging. That’s true when it comes to sex, but a whole lot more than that too. I’m not in the same headspace and neither is he.
Luckily, I picked a partner who is willing to evolve — and who also supports my own journey of evolution. Now, Rob and I have been together for 19 years and married for 13. It’s something that I never thought myself capable of, an achievement I’m proud of.
When I mentioned it recently to my mother, she said, “Oh, well. Time for a break then. Otherwise it’s like eating the same bowl of cornflakes every day for 19 years.”
When I’m confronted with her point of view, I see it as more evidence that keeping my relationship intact has been a true accomplishment. I love my husband and we like being together, even if it isn’t always perfect. We remain great partners.
Last month, in what has become our tradition, we went on an anniversary trip with a travel group, this time to Africa. In a nod to our differences, on Valentine’s Day I went on the morning elephant encounter and he went on the river rafting trip. He came back upset — and minus his wedding ring, a custom-made band that he loved dearly. It likely flew off in one of the pre-launch training exercises. In earlier years, the symbolism of this news would have absorbed and derailed me. I would have been wondering if it meant the end of us. This time I had to shrug and remind myself: It’s a good thing I like cornflakes.
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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