Lifestyle
Shaky voice? There’s no shame at this no-audition choir that's teaching Angelenos to sing
The emails arrive in people’s inboxes a few times each year with subject lines like: “Want more positivity in your life?” “We all need this right now!” or “Do something for YOU.”
Recipients might be inclined to immediately trash these messages, mistaking them for spam promoting the latest weight–loss drug or advertisements for an upcoming Danube River cruise. But they’re actually heartfelt messages from Greg Delson, a 44-year-old native Angeleno and voice educator who funneled his passion for singing into forming one of the city’s most popular secular adult choirs.
Voice educator Greg Delson, center, starts every choir rehearsal with an icebreaker to help the singers loosen up and get centered.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Offering two eight-week seasons a year in the spring and fall, Landlights Community Choir has grown profoundly since its launch in 2019. What started as a single class of 35 people singing pop songs in someone’s living room has expanded into a roster of 260 singers divided among four choir groups across the Greater Los Angeles area — City, South Bay, Valley and Westside L.A. — with a wait list of more than 100 people eagerly counting down the days until the next one. It is not unknown for attendees to commute from as far away as Ventura or Riverside counties to attend their group’s weekly 1-hour-and-45-minute rehearsals. Sessions for each group culminate in a full-production, pop-music-heavy final concert backed by a live band of professional musicians. Although the set list is never revealed before the concerts, the songs for the upcoming spring performances revolve around themes of growth and progress.
A choir that’s about uplifting one another
The secret sauce behind Landlights is its dedication to fun and its approach to rigidity. There are no auditions, and all skill levels are welcome. Attendance is not mandatory, not even for the final concert. Everyone, regardless of talent, can sign up for a solo, and the No. 1 rule sets the tone for the whole experience: “No shaming anyone, ever.”
“My mission is to get the world singing together,” says Delson, who has a master’s degree in music education from Boston University. “My work is to remove the barriers to entry and encourage everyone to sing, regardless of their self-perceived abilities or skill level.”
Two-time returnee Marina Fox joins in song during a rehearsal for the City group’s spring 2025 season.
(William Liang / For The Times)
These sentiments spoke to 23-year-old Marina Fox, and it’s how she found herself standing in front of a crowd of 385 people, reciting the opening line to “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at Landlights’ fall concert in Koreatown last November.
Fox had been nervous about signing up for a solo, or as Delson calls them, “special moments.” As a recent college graduate holding down her first full-time job, Fox hadn’t been sure she should join an extracurricular group, let alone elect to have a “special moment.” But her fellow City choir members emphatically encouraged her to sign up for a solo, and Fox took the plunge. She’s glad she did.
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An adult secular choir has become massively popular thanks to its policy of no shaming and letting in everyone who wants to join.
“It felt amazing. I don’t do a lot of things in my life that warrant applause,” Fox says. “When you graduate from college, there’s a little bit of a loss of self because the path isn’t set for you anymore. Singing in this choir has given me back so much confidence.”
Dressed in a joyful orange ensemble, Fox was flanked by her fellow choir members, each dressed in a richly hued jewel tone of their choice. As Fox stepped away from the mic, her delight was palpable. Even though it was just a short segment of a hit song from 2009, it felt like a major accomplishment.
“It was almost like crossing the finish line in my postgraduate life,” she says, “because I was finally back to doing something that brought me a ton of joy and excitement, and I had something to show for it.”
Then something surprising happened at the performance. Two singers stepped out of the ranks to recite the closing lines, and one of them ad-libbed an addition.
Turning to the other performer, she dropped down on one knee and said: “Ever since we met, you’ve felt like going home. Baby, will you please marry me?”
The crowd — and the choir — went wild. There was applause, tears, children running amok and flowers being thrown in the air.
Delson selects popular songs from artists and groups such as Adele and ABBA that most choir members will already know the words to.
(Sebastian Garcia)
Even for Landlights standards, this was a momentous event. At no other time in the six years of Landlights’ history has a marriage proposal happened at a concert — but other magic has brewed, thanks to the group’s unique concoction of support and camaraderie. Romantic matches have been made, singing careers have been started, bands have been formed, podcasts have been launched, health conditions like asthma have been improved and more than a few people have found a part of themselves they’d been missing.
Ron Gould, a 70-year-old creative director who joined the City group last season with his wife, regained a confidence he’d lost at age 12 when his voice cracked during a glee club performance of “Over the Rainbow.”
After years of relying on friendships formed through her husband, 37-year-old Carole Buckner developed a community of her own that has kept her rejoining the choir each season. And Cheryl Hoffman, a retired UCLA radiologist, got back in touch with a creative side of her personality that for decades had remained dormant because of the nature of her work.
“When I see the looks of joy and pride on their faces — that’s my favorite part of this whole thing,” Delson says. “You just see people blossoming right before your eyes. It’s what fuels me to keep doing this.”
Greg Delson, center, has steadily grown the Landlights Community Choir since its inception in 2019.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Keep it secular and just sing the hits
Although there are a handful of community choirs sprinkled throughout Los Angeles, Landlights is said to be the only continuous group that eschews audition requirements for admission. It’s different in other ways too. The songs performed are popular music, with a few smatterings of classics from the last century, including “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas and the John Denver hit “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
The benefit of focusing on these tunes — aside from their broader appeal compared to, say, chorale music — is that the majority of singers are already familiar with them and don’t need to know how to read sheet music to perform them.
Delson credits his background in community music and the research-based teaching methods he learned at the Complete Vocal Institute in Copenhagen for helping shape the core principles of Landlights.
Delson makes an effort to create a safe space that encourages participants to ask questions, fraternize with others and leave their stress at home. He is a firm believer that anyone can sing; it’s just a matter of providing them the right anatomical training — and making sure they have fun while doing it.
It’s why self-professed “extroverted introvert” Buckner felt comfortable signing up for her first season in the spring of 2022.
“I figured if it sucked I wouldn’t be locked in and could bail at any time. Luckily, I was completely hooked after the first practice,” she says. “It’s a little like summer camp in the way we all come together for a short time and build strong bonds. Honestly, it’s a much better all-around experience than my sixth-grade honor choir was.”
Buckner is a singer in Landlights’ Valley group, marking her seventh season in the choir.
Carole Buckner hadn’t sung in public since sixth-grade choir class but has enjoyed participating in Landlights Community Choir so much that she’s joined for the last seven seasons.
(William Liang / For The Times)
An adult choir with zero pressure
The scheduling flexibility of Landlights has been a strong appeal for Hoffman, who has been in the choir for four seasons and sang her first “special moment” at the City group’s concert last fall.
“I come from a world that’s a lot more structured, so it’s really relaxing and welcoming to see another way of doing things,” she says.
The choir attracts a range of participants across age groups (so long as they’re 18 or older), skill level and background. While some are novice singers and karaoke bar enthusiasts, many come from the entertainment industry, where they work as actors, dancers or fledgling musicians.
To foster community, name tags are worn at every rehearsal, with green stickers used by newcomers and orange ones for returnees. Delson and members agree that it takes the pressure off having to remember names, allowing people to focus on feeling comfortable when they practice the songs.
In the greenroom shortly before the start of the City group’s fall 2024 concert, emotions ran high as Delson gave a pep talk.
(Cynthia Garcia)
Learn from a voice expert at a discount
For more than two decades, Delson has worked as a voice coach, but he also has been a songwriter, recording artist, backup singer, producer, vocal arranger and educator.
Another benefit to the choir is that members can learn from him without the substantially heftier prices for his private voice training sessions. Previous eight-week seasons have cost in the ballpark of $350, depending on how early or late one signed up, as discounts are given to those who commit promptly as well as to returning singers. That’s nearly as much as one private lesson with Delson.
“I love having economical ways for people to be able to sing, and in our choir rehearsals, I’m definitely teaching them tricks and skills,” Delson says. “I also make audio files on Dropbox for each of them where I teach them their parts, such as how to get the notes and make the vowels.”
It’s not just what you’re singing but who’s teaching you
The model that Landlights follows wouldn’t be hard for another choir to replicate. Throw together a set list of pop songs, let everyone join, ban people from critiquing themselves and others, and end the season with a big-bang performance. But there’s one key ingredient that would be missing: Delson.
“Greg is a very special human being, and I think without him, you couldn’t necessarily make this happen,” Hoffman says. “He brings people from all walks of life together with his unique perspective and charisma. He really is the glue.”
Gould, who admits he only begrudgingly joined the choir to have a bonding activity with his wife, was similarly impressed.
“Greg’s whole thing is making you feel more than,” Gould says. “He is so courageous with what he does in getting people to loosen up and try these different exercises. There’s a certain level of feeling silly, and he’s able to lead by example and get you in that mode.”
At the City group’s fall 2024 concert, a record number of members signed up to perform a solo or, as Delson calls them, “special moments.”
(Sebastian Garcia)
As demand to join the choir has grown, Delson has been working on crafting groups of no more than 65 singers each so that everyone’s voice can be heard while also scaling them so he doesn’t have to turn people away for lack of space. It’s a tricky balance, and it’s why he’s expanded the choir to multiple locations and hired associate conductors, which is something he plans to invest in more heavily for the future.
“I hate telling people no when it comes to people wanting to sing, so it has to grow,” he says. “My task right now is trying to identify the elements that make Landlights what it is, codifying that and teaching it to others.”
But that’s a long-term goal, because at the moment, Delson has bigger things to focus on: namely, the upcoming spring concerts taking place from the end of March through early April in West L.A., Sherman Oaks, El Segundo and Santa Monica.
He’s not worried about how the groups will sound — he knows they will sound phenomenal. Also, he’s not worried about members forgetting their lines or missing their notes. Because in the end, Landlights is about more than just the singing.
“We’ve lost so many of these third spaces that bring people together, and Landlights is an antidote to that,” Delson says. “You don’t see anyone on their phone in rehearsal. Everyone’s just talking and smiling and being present, having fun and just realizing how much they have in common. And to me, that is true community choir. That is what Landlights is about.”
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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