Lifestyle
Meow Wolf supercharged the way we experience art. Is L.A. ready for the wild ride?
A Meow Wolf exhibition is designed as a dream space, a walk-through floor-to-ceiling collection of psychedelic art with a sci-fi bent and an anything-goes, punk rock spirit.
Apples that melodically squeal when squeezed? One can find those in “Omega Mart,” Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas exhibition. A video game that grapples with an uncompromising, impossible-to-please parent? Head to “The Real Unreal” outside Dallas. A neon-soaked forest in a suburban backyard? That originated in Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe, N.M., home.
“We are undefinable in so many ways, and it makes people think, ‘It’s just entertainment,’” says Meow Wolf curator Han Santana-Sayles, 31, sitting in her newly rented Pasadena home. “But I truly believe we are a wild art experiment.”
Pasadena-based Han Santana-Sayles recently returned home to SoCal to help curate Meow Wolf’s in-development West L.A. location. The centerpiece of her family room is a desk fashioned to look like a tapir, created by artist Miles Robinson.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
Meow Wolf spaces, of which there are currently four open, are warped visions of reality, designed to get guests to see the world, and hopefully themselves, differently. They’re spots where the familiar — think a grocery store or a home — is used as an entry point to otherworldly, maximalist art that’s at once a fantastical twist on nature and a deep dive into why-are-we-here philosophies.
So what happens when Meow Wolf decides that its next place of expansion is the home of American make-believe?
Meow Wolf is coming to Los Angeles, and it aims to turn our city’s most ritualistic experience — that is, the act of going to the movies — into an interactive, art-driven wonderland.
The Santa Fe-based art collective-turned-capitalistic enterprise — leaders of the so-called “experience economy” — is in the closing round of negotiations that will bring a Meow Wolf exhibition to West Los Angeles, with an opening targeted for 2026. Meow Wolf will be taking over a vacant movie theater complex and intends to fully embrace the spot’s cinematic roots. Meow Wolf’s move into its largest market yet is intended as a statement piece, a declaration that weirdness and art-focused ventures still have a place in an immersive economy that’s been racked by closures and layoffs, Meow Wolf included.
“A movie theater is representative of the history of L.A., a city that has been known for over 100 years with Hollywood and moviemaking,” says Meow Wolf Chief Executive Jose Tolosa. “I think the location we picked is one of the components that embodies the richness and the history of the city, and the artistry of the city.”
Anticipate multiple rooms of narrative-based art that strive to test perceptions, grappling with not only the stories we tell one another but why we tell them, says co-founder Sean Di Ianni, 39, who is overseeing the L.A. project.
If Disney and Universal theme parks ask us to “ride the movies,” Meow Wolf will be challenging guests to question their communal power, exploring, via hallucinatory art, the minds of those who make them, sell them and love them. Expect it all to be delivered with hints of mysticism, as Meow Wolf artists will dabble in themes of ritual and religion.
Meow Wolf co-founder Sean Di Ianni says the L.A. locale will explore the communal power of film.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
Like past Meow Wolf exhibitions, a significant number of installations will come from the local art community. Santana-Sayles, a Murrieta native who now resides a few blocks from where her grandmother once lived, will lead the outreach into L.A.’s art world, a process that is in its infancy. A Meow Wolf exhibition is a mix of elaborately designed environments and commissioned works from artists who reside in the host city.
“I’m looking for a super broad range,” she says. “I want to include people who do wild projection mapping. But I also want to find people who do just pastels — really, really well. Or they’re painters. Or they draw. They’ve homed in on this one thing. We don’t want it to read as a theme park. We’re a contemporary arts platform.”
I want to include people who do wild projection mapping. But I also want to find people who do just pastels — really, really well. Or they’re painters. Or they draw.
— Meow Wolf curator Han Santana-Sayles
And yet the company’s rise from experimental art collective in 2008 to an “experience economy” corporation has been meteoric, attracting creative talent from theme park giants such as the Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal. It has been embraced by the likes of the Themed Entertainment Assn., and Meow Wolf’s play-focused, active approach has shifted the industry, encouraging environments with multiple access points that increasingly push guests to lean in and participate.
Meow Wolf’s poster art for its in-development West Los Angeles space.
(Meow Wolf)
Meow Wolf’s roots in underground art and its penchant for flirting with popular culture have resulted in a specific kind of tension. Meow Wolf is a corporation, but one that staunchly believes in original intellectual property. Meow Wolf stands by the power of the individual creator, having long supported independent muralists, game designers or sculpture artists, but it also traffics in interconnected storylines that require the sort of environmental storytelling defined by Disney’s theme parks.
Its ambitions are high art, but it’s also extremely populist. And that says nothing of Meow Wolf’s outspoken penchant for progressive politics. Melding all of this with a capitalistic enterprise could seem like a contradiction, but it also feels uniquely fit for Los Angeles.
“I love the chaoticness of it,” Santana-Sayles says of Los Angeles. “I love that yesterday I was on the street and someone was flipping a sign, really incredibly. He had a Walkman on and was doing a dancing Jesus sign movement. On the other corner was a juggler, a Cirque du Soleil-qualified juggler. Then on the other side of the street was a kid skateboarding with a dog under his arm.
“It’s an active, creative, chaotic mix of things,” she says. “It feels like art.”
The Los Angeles announcement arrives at what has become a reflection point for the immersive community.
Meow Wolf, along with long-running New York-based theatrical production “Sleep No More,” defined the immersive space. Since 2016, when the once-scrappy Meow Wolf art collective opened Santa Fe’s “House of Eternal Return,” the company has welcomed about 10 million visitors across its four venues. Yet in April Meow Wolf announced it would cut 165 employees; exhibitions in Denver and Las Vegas were heavily affected. “Sleep No More,” meanwhile, which has been running since 2011, will end this year.
A suburban house leads to a fantastical twist on nature at Meow Wolf’s “House of Eternal Return” in Santa Fe, N.M.
(Kate Russell / Meow Wolf)
The two spawned an industry of interactive, social media-primed spaces, one that saw the rise and fall of everything from projection-based exhibitions such as “Immersive Van Gogh” to Lost Spirits, a heavily themed Las Vegas rum distillery with circus trappings, which just shuttered. The Walt Disney Co. even got in on the action via the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a two-day live-action role-playing game that utilized a mobile phone app to drive gameplay with real-life actors and sets. It lasted about a year.
Meow Wolf’s Tolosa pins the recent layoffs on two factors. One, he says, the company has become better at understanding its staffing needs, having opened a Denver exhibition with more than 300 employees. Last year’s “The Real Unreal” in Grapevine, Texas, in contrast, launched with a staff of around 100. He also notes that attendance tends to peak from a period of opening to around 18 months after, necessitating that the company adjust its models.
A fixture in a neon city at Meow Wolf’s “The Real Unreal” in Grapevine, Texas.
(Emil T. Lippe / For The Times)
“We remain committed to a growth path,” Tolosa says. “Not only in L.A. but beyond. We’re already looking into other cities.” Tolosa adds that Meow Wolf is continuing to build an app that will connect all of its exhibitions, and is exploring other mediums such as gaming.
Meow Wolf, says Noah Nelson, founder of immersive entertainment site No Proscenium and its accompanying conference, is still one of the most recognizable names in the sector. While the layoffs raised eyebrows, the pledge to future exhibitions is an argument that the audience isn’t eroding.
“Meow Wolf represents the paradox,” Nelson says.
“It was born from a wild artist collective that created these family-friendly psychedelic sandboxes,” he says. “It morphed into a business that became increasingly a business and is still trying to hold onto that family-friendly psychedelic sandbox energy. It’s still trying to maintain its soul. That’s a tightrope that is very hard to walk, and it has at times been downright scary to watch them walk it. The upside is that they’re still walking it.”
Meow Wolf represents the paradox. It was born from a wild artist collective that created these family-friendly psychedelic sandboxes. It morphed into a business that became increasingly a business and is still trying to hold onto that family-friendly psychedelic sandbox energy.
— Noah Nelson, founder of immersive entertainment site No Proscenium
Meow Wolf’s Sean Di Ianni has seen the art collective through ups and downs. “I’ve felt the pain, the struggle, the beauty and the mystery and magic in all different ways,” he says.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
Di Ianni helped grow Meow Wolf from an artist community into a corporation.
“I’ve been on all sides of this,” Di Ianni says. “I’ve created things. I helped organize things. I helped form the business. I’ve conducted layoffs myself. I’ve felt the pain, the struggle, the beauty and the mystery and magic in all different ways. It’s still happening. We’re still experiencing it. People, sometimes people who weren’t around for it, think of the early days as some utopian fantasy. It wasn’t that. It was a chaotic, anarchic mess.
“I guess what I’m saying,” he says, “is it’s always been a struggle.”
Di Ianni and Santana-Sayles hope Los Angeles will be a point of healing. After all, it just may be Meow Wolf’s most personal artistic statement yet.
The large thematic touchpoints for what would become Meow Wolf’s L.A. space were sketched out about two years ago. Many of them originated with Matt King, whom Di Ianni credits for leading a significant portion of Meow Wolf’s philosophical bent. King died by suicide in July 2022.
While Di Ianni is keeping much of the narrative a secret, he said the team envisioned as its setting “a world at a distant crossroads” in the midst of some sort of ritual. “What if this place we’re creating has some event that occurs, and people are drawn to this event the way people are drawn to a panda being born at a zoo?” Di Ianni says.
Santana-Sayles digs deeper.
She was King’s fiancée at the time of his death, and at various points a conversation with her delves into a discussion on how to process grief. An art piece of King’s, a woven portrait of flowers, sits in her living room waiting to be hung. After his death, she says, she made the decision to return to L.A. to be closer to her family. That Meow Wolf would center its next project here became a fortunate coincidence.
Han Santana-Sayles is eager to work on an exhibition in her home region. “I love the chaoticness of it,” she says of Los Angeles.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
“It’s so hard to be split from people,” she says of the last two years of her life. “They become you, and you become them.”
She takes comfort in being able to bring one of King’s final Meow Wolf ideas to fruition, and she and Di Ianni speak of wanting to protect what King was envisioning. “It’ll be harder for me to work on a Meow Wolf that he had nothing to do with,” Santana-Sayles says. “That won’t be far off. It’s the project after this. That will be way more challenging for me. I feel like I still get to hold his hand.”
When discussing some of the themes for the Los Angeles exhibition, she heads to her bookshelf and digs out a stack of King’s books, specifically ones he was reading in the last year of his life. King, she says, was becoming heavily fascinated with theories that interwove astrology and the Bible.
“He would come to dinners and say, ‘I’m so excited to tell you that this chapter of the Bible is actually parallel to this incredible spring equinox and the equinox is a metaphor for the way Moses parted the sea,’” she says. “I thought Matt, frankly, was sometimes extremely discerning about his sources and sometimes not at all. He would flip between different texts — historic texts, and then things that were on the verge of conspiracy theory. He just wanted to absorb.
“This exhibit,” Santana-Sayles says, “I do think, in the funniest way, grapples with big mystical and religious questions. Not overtly, but in a way people will read themselves into. I think there’s a lot to be explored there.”
Santana-Sayles and her team will have a significant say in how. It’s early days but she’s in the midst of working with consultants to create demographic surveys of Los Angeles, striving to ensure the exhibit will fully represent the diversity of the region. As a SoCal native from a Mexican American family, Santana-Sayles says, “I would be dishonored” if the exhibit failed in its mission to capture the breadth of the L.A. population. A cultural engagement specialist has been hired for outreach to Indigenous artist groups.
“It’s really important to make that intentional,” she says. “I’m not just going out and saying, ‘They have art I like. I’m going to bring them in.’ It’s a combination. Yes, they’re an amazing artist, and they have a really important story for this region.”
Han Santana-Sayles will be leading Meow Wolf’s outreach to the L.A. art community. “It has to be immersive in some way that playfully subverts reality,” she says, when asked what she’s looking for.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
Santana-Sayles is asked what makes a Meow Wolf artist. It’s not always an easy answer. In Grapevine, for instance, “The Real Unreal,” housed in a former Bed Bath & Beyond, is centered around a family story of grief. On a tour of the space last summer, many of the locally commissioned pieces appeared designed to celebrate community and healing, be it a calming tower of reflective geometric shapes that feels like a place of worship, or murals that reference Greek mythology and hint at being at an emotional crossroads.
“We’re really looking for experiential art — it has to be immersive in some way that playfully subverts reality and that thematically connects with what we’re doing as a whole with the exhibition,” Santana-Sayles says. Then she references works from other Meow Wolf exhibitions.
“There’s so many different ways to do that,” she continues. “Ways people do that are with materials, characters and concepts. We have people doing Indigenous futurism. We have people working with only trash art, reconstructing everyday items. We have people making completely different planets that have their own interesting logic. The umbrella feels quite broad, but that’s really what I’m trying to find. I’m looking for people who have a really defined sense of what they do.”
Regardless of what is conceived, don’t assume a passive experience. The Meow Wolf design philosophy is one that’s based on active participation by the guest, a shift from less assertive forms of entertainment of yore, be it a museum or the early days of theme parks. Stray, not-so-hidden paths and an assortment of nooks dot a Meow Wolf exhibition, inviting guests to choose their own narrative. Story threads are peppered throughout. “Omega Mart,” for instance, grapples with environmental distress and corporate responsibility.
Meow Wolf’s West L.A. theater, says Di Ianni, also will be built for discovery. The byzantine paths and shifts in art direction are what he refers to as “good mystery confusion.”
“That was one of the challenges of using a movie theater as a point of entry,” Di Ianni says. “It’s passive. But there are stories told in movie theaters, and then there are stories of movie theaters and stories of the people who work at movie theaters. But when you get into that auditorium, it’s meant to be a blank space where stories are told. It’s a little meta. This is a storytelling space about storytelling.”
For those looking for further hints as to where the Los Angeles exhibition may veer, Di Ianni mentions that he and the team back in Santa Fe soon will be doing a group watch of Wolfgang Petersen’s “The Neverending Story.” The 1984 film is a fantastical work about the beauty of our imaginations and how art can bring dreamlike worlds to life.
Sean Di Ianni, based in Santa Fe, N.M., says Meow Wolf’s L.A. location will be “a storytelling space about storytelling.”
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
At Meow Wolf’s “Omega Mart,” guests first enter a satiric take on a grocery store, where portals lead to otherworldly art exhibitions.
(Christopher DeVargas / Meow Wolf)
And that’s ultimately fitting for a Meow Wolf exhibition. While there are narrative threads and elaborate ideas, Meow Wolf spaces are essentially places of wonder, where dozens of disparate artists come together to create something akin to an explorable fairy tale.
“We can’t control whether you decide to change your perception of the world, or change yourself or change the world,” Di Ianni says. “But we can set up the conditions for people to have a little more access to that possibility. It’s very high-minded and very activist in a way. That’s what art and entertainment does. That’s why we go on vacation. That’s why we go to Disneyland. We want to see the world differently. We want to open up possibilities.”
Meow Wolf’s exhibitions have always been theaters for fantasy, centering the guest as the performer. Eventually, they were bound to find themselves in a city whose primary industry is known for creating dreamers.
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.
9
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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