Lifestyle
Why Patricia Highsmith's most famous creature, Tom Ripley, continues to fascinate
Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
hide caption
toggle caption
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
For a total psychopath, Tom Ripley is remarkably popular. As we near the 25th anniversary of the acclaimed Oscar-nominated big screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s most infamous creation, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Netflix has released a striking new reimagining, simply titled Ripley. Sinister and visually stunning, the series reminds us why the book continues to influence popular culture.
Through seven decades, Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley has grown in allure as a masterwork of American noir, boosted by – but distinct from – its adaptations. The core story is always the same: A wealthy man enlists fraudster Tom Ripley, his son’s distant acquaintance, to travel to Italy and woo his errant, playboy son back to the fold; but rather than returning Dickie to his family, an envious Tom disposes of him and assumes his identity. Other murders follow to cover the first.
This bloody-minded serial killer fantasist and antisocial social climber would become Patricia Highsmith’s best known and best loved creation. She published five Ripley novels in all from 1955 to 1991, the last a few years before her death. Since his debut, her all-American psychopath has inspired six screen adaptations, a play by Phyllis Nagy, and a musical staging. That legacy is a testament to Ripley’s complicated appeal – amoral, unassuming and audacious — and Highsmith’s scalpel-sharp writing. There’s something irresistible about an unapologetic grifter, who seizes the chance at a better life by stealing someone else’s. The text is rich enough to handle wildly different interpretations that feel true to the original and brilliant in their own right.
A window into Ripley’s roots
In the first Ripley novel, one childhood scene is especially vivid. When he was 12, and his parents long dead, Tom’s reluctant guardian Aunt Dottie made him get out of her car and run an errand on foot while stuck in traffic. When the cars started moving again, Tom was forced into “running between huge, inching cars, always about to touch the door of Aunt Dottie’s car and never being quite able to…” Instead of waiting, his aunt “had kept inching along as fast as she could go…” Worse, she taunted him, “yelling, ‘Come on, come on, slowpoke!’ out the window.” The memory ends with Tom in teary frustration and his aunt hurling a slur at him: “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!”
This story bubbles up into the memory of the adult con man Tom Ripley while he’s lying on a ship deck chair on the way to Europe. Buoyed in body and spirit by the luxury and abundance of his surroundings, Tom starts to plot a brighter future for himself. But he keeps returning to past indignities, and that cruel vignette stands out. Looking back from his comfortable perch, Ripley thinks, “It was a wonder he had emerged from such treatment as well as he had.” This isn’t justification, just a part of Ripley’s essence – Ripley as a vulnerable boy rather than cipher or leech or thief, a man whose emotional and physical deprivations curdle into resentment and violence.
Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley in the Netflix series Ripley.
Philippe Antonello/Netflix © 2023
hide caption
toggle caption
Philippe Antonello/Netflix © 2023
That window into Ripley’s roots is one reason I loved re-reading the novel in the lead up to a new adaptation. Highsmith illuminates the inner life of what she recognized as her “psychopath hero” with identification rather than judgment (Highsmith was openly enamored of her creation). That intense interiority is one reason Highsmith is often credited with helping reinvent and popularize the psychological thriller, a genre with roots in the 19th century, and why her influence persists despite a deservedly controversial reputation. Her debut novel became Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) less than a year after publication, and her 1957 novel Deep Water appears on The Atlantic’s list of 100 Great American novels.
With Ripley, the narration lives outside of Tom but close enough for dissection. We learn that he’s a loner but not completely, that he gets antsy around people, only able to sustain a performance of normalcy for so long. He’s caught between a need for independence born of his smothering yet loveless upbringing and an aching desire for other people’s good regard.
In proximity to beauty and privilege but not of it, Tom’s neediness escalates. He’s ruthless and amoral, but human and self-conscious. He sobs! And he yearns.. Scene by masterful scene, sentence by sentence, with each disturbing thought and memory, Highsmith reveals how Ripley’s psyche veers out of bounds, a slow drip punctuated by shocking jumps. When Dickie and Tom give a taxi home to a local girl they bump into, and she thanks them, calling them the nicest Americans she’s ever met, Tom remarks to Dickie, “You know what most crummy Americans would do in a case like that—rape her.” It’s a sharp kick in the midst of banality.
Worse, when real violent thoughts finally result in action, Tom revels like a pig in mud in his stolen persona. Feeling “blameless and free,” he likens his confidence in Dickie’s shoes to how “a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be played better by anyone else.” The great beauty of Highsmith’s novel lies in moments like this, illuminating the dark recesses of a psyche spinning out of control.
A story ripe for retelling
A portrait this faceted begs for retelling and reinvention — it’s a dream role for an actor — but the text also defies total capture. Highsmith could make a two-act play out of the domestic symbolism and social psychological dynamics of Dickie purchasing a refrigerator.
The beauty of the 1999 movie and 2024 series interpretations of Ripley, despite this high bar, is that they’re fully formed artworks of their own.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
hide caption
toggle caption
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Netflix’s series has both the text and the sublimely entertaining 1999 movie with its constellation of Hollywood stars to live up to. Matt Damon and Jude Law were at the height of their powers as Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf (Law earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination), and Gwyneth Paltrow was incandescent and multidimensional as Dickie’s girlfriend Marge. They’re memorably supported by Cate Blanchette and Philip Seymour Hoffman as trust fund-babies abroad. Their production is gorgeously shot in the sun-drenched Amalfi coast and the Oscar nominated soundtrack beautifully amplifies the emotion and story. In Anthony Minghella’s screenplay, when the nastiness and violence emerge from Dickie as well as Tom it’s an arresting aberration against this deliberately effervescent, candy-colored backdrop.
The appeal of Minghella’s acclaimed and popular film has more than endured, but it’s not the only classic iteration of Ripley’s debut. The first significant big screen rendering was the 1960 French thriller Purple Noon, starring Alain Delon as a Ripley with beauty that rivals Dickie’s. There are three less celebrated adaptations of other Ripley novels. 2023’s Saltburn wasn’t a Ripley reimagining but its story of upper class ruin at the hands of an interloper seem to spring from a similar well. Plus, the film’s most audacious interlude reads as an homage to Jude Law and Matt Damon’s homoerotic bathtub scene, and the movie and discourse around added new heat to the Highsmith mystique.
Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.
Chris Pizzello/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Chris Pizzello/AP
Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.
Chris Pizzello/AP
Despite all that history, the pedigreed new Netflix production successfully forges its own haunting vision of Ripley. Written and directed by Steve Zaillian (screenwriter of Schindler’s List and The Irishman), Ripley (mostly) benefits from having more space to breathe than the film – and from Andrew Scott’s unflinching performance.
Leaving the Hot Priest of Fleabag fame behind, Scott gives a harder, colder interpretation of the title role. Though significantly older than Highsmith’s 25-year-old antihero, the 47-year-old BAFTA winner Scott (All of Us Strangers, Sherlock) fully embodies the brooding and seething Ripley. Rather than charming and boyish, Netflix’s Tom Ripley is visibly creased and battered. Instead of Highsmith’s peevish 25-year-old, who notices with pleasure and opportunism physical resemblances with his privileged friend, Ripley and Dickie’s relationship is more clearly grifter and target. Ripley director Zaillan also advances the timeline to 1961, plunging Ripley into a more modern and edgy world.
Scott is well supported by Johnny Flynn (Emma) as a feckless Dickie, and Dakota Fanning, who delivers a mannered and pricklier Marge, the role that Gwyneth Paltrow made famous. If there’s one flaw, it’s that Ripley masters the style and techniques of Hitchcockian noir, without its momentum. This series’ slow deliberate pace and eerie quiet can sometimes feel like a slog.
Still, Ripley‘s performances and striking style elevate the series. Rendered in stark Black and white tones, each shot is as visually arresting as the best still photo. Anthropological and artistic, it’s the opposite of Anthony Minghella’s bright Italian playground presided over by Jude Law as a golden god. This approach transforms even the most ordinary scene —a cat on a bench in a Roman rooming house — into a foreboding tableau. The noirish visuals are the perfect look for this seedier and more cerebral thriller. So too are the peeling paint, decaying edifices, and too many steps on which the camera lingers. All together, the aesthetic looks like something out of an avant-garde European movie like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête or a painting by Caravaggio. The series significantly expands on what Highsmith wrote about Tom’s relationship with high art, spinning the idea that he had “discovered an interest in paintings” from emulating Dickie into an obsessive identification with a 17th-century Italian painter known for his bloody and brutal canvases, interplay of shadow and light, and for murder. It’s an ingenious representation of Tom’s descent on screen.
With these inspired creative choices, the Anthony Minghella film and the Netflix series stand on their own. But if you have the inclination, the two major screen productions and the novel form a phenomenal triple bill.
A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.
When John Lantigua, a retired journalist in Miami Beach, checked his email one recent morning, he was glad to see an invitation.
“It was like, ‘Come and share an evening with me. Click here for details,’” Mr. Lantigua said.
It appeared to be a Paperless Post invitation from someone he once worked with at The Palm Beach Post, a man who had left Florida for Mississippi and liked to arrange dinners when he was back in town.
Mr. Lantigua, 78, clicked the link. It didn’t open.
He clicked a second time. Still nothing.
He didn’t realize what was going on until a mutual friend who had received the same email told him it wasn’t an invitation at all. It was a scam.
Phishing scams have long tried to frighten people into clicking on links with emails claiming that their bank accounts have been hacked, or that they owe thousands of dollars in fines, or that their pornography viewing habits have been tracked.
The invitation scam is a little more subtle: It preys on the all-too-human desire to be included in social gatherings.
The phishy invitations mimic emails from Paperless Post, Evite and Punchbowl. What appears to be a friendly overture from someone you know is really a digital Trojan horse that gives scammers access to your personal information.
“I thought it was diabolical that they would choose somebody who has sent me a legitimate invitation before,” Mr. Lantigua said. “He’s a friend of mine. If he’s coming to town, I want to see him.”
Rachel Tobac, the chief executive of SocialProof Security, a cybersecurity firm, said she noticed the scam last holiday season.
“Phishing emails are not a new thing,” Ms. Tobac said, “but every six months, we get a new lure that hijacks our amygdala in new ways. There’s such a desire for folks to get together that this lure is interesting to people. They want to go to a party.”
Phishing scams involve “two distinct paths,” Ms. Tobac added. In one, the recipient is served a link that turns out to be dead, or so it seems. A click activates malware that runs silently as it gleans passwords and other bits of personal information. In all likelihood, this is what happened when Mr. Lantigua clicked on the ersatz invitation link.
Another scam offers a working link. Potential victims who click on it are asked to provide a password. Those who take that next step are a boon to hackers.
“They have complete control of your email and, in turn, your entire digital life,” Ms. Tobac said. “They can reset your password for your dog’s Instagram account. They can take over your bank account. Change your health insurance.”
Digital invitation platforms are trying to combat the scam by publishing guides on how to spot fake invitations. Paperless Post has also set up an email account — phishing@paperlesspost.com — for users to submit messages for verification. The company sends suspicious links to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a nonprofit that maintains a database monitored by cybersecurity firms. Flagged links are rendered ineffective.
The scammers’ new strategy of exploiting the desire for connection is infuriating, said Alexa Hirschfeld, a founder of Paperless Post. “Life can be isolating,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “When it looks like you’re getting an invitation from someone you know, your first instinct is excitement, not skepticism.”
Olivia Pollock, the vice president of brand for Evite, said that fake invitations tended to be generic, promising a birthday party or a celebration of life. Most invitations these days tend to have a specific focus — mahjong gatherings or book club talks, for instance. “The devil is in the details,” Ms. Pollock said.
Because scammers don’t know how close you are with the people in your contact list, fake invitations may also seem random. “They could be from your business school roommate you haven’t spoken to in 10 years,” Ms. Hirschfeld said.
Alyssa Williamson, who works in public relations in New York, was leaving a yoga class recently when she checked her phone and saw an invitation from a college classmate.
“I assumed it was an alumni event,” Ms. Williamson, 30, said. “I clicked on it, and it was like, ‘Enter your email.’ I didn’t even think about it.”
Later that day, she received texts from friends asking her about the party invitation she had just sent out. Her response: What party?
“The thing is, I host a lot of events,” she said. “Some knew it was fake. Others were like, ‘What’s this? I can’t open it.’”
Andrew Smith, a graduate student in finance who lives in Manhattan, received what looked like a Punchbowl invitation to “a memory making celebration.” It appeared to have come from a woman he had dated in college. He received it when he was having drinks at a bar on a Friday night — “a pretty insidious piece of timing,” he said.
“The choice of sender was super clever,” Mr. Smith, 29, noted. “This was somebody that would probably get a reaction from me.”
Mr. Smith seized on the phrase “memory making celebration” and filled in the blanks. He imagined that someone in his ex-girlfriend’s immediate family had died. Perhaps she wanted to restart contact at this difficult moment.
Something saved him when he clicked a link and tried to tap out his personal information — his inability to remember the password to his email account. The next day, he reached out to his ex, who confirmed that the invitation was fake.
“It didn’t trigger any alarm bells,” Mr. Smith said. “I went right for the click. I went completely animal brain.”
The new scam comes with an unfortunate side effect, a suspicion of invitations altogether. It’s enough to make a person antisocial.
“Don’t invite me to anything,” Mr. Lantigua, the retired journalist, said, only half-joking. “I’m not coming.”
You want to know where men’s fashion is heading? Follow the geeks.
These are the obsessives, fixated, with a NASA technician’s precision, on how their pants fit or on which pair of Paraboot shoes is the correct pair. These are the obsessives who in the aughts were early to selvage denim (now available at a Uniqlo near you!) and soft-shouldered Italian tailoring in the mode that, eventually, trickled down to your local J. Crew.
And where has the attention of this cohort landed now? On a vanguard of newish-to-the-West labels from Japan, like A.Presse, Comoli, Auralee and T.T.
1
A.Presse is probably the most hyped of this cohort. What other label is worn by the French soccer player Pierre Kalulu and the actor Cooper Hoffman and has men paying a premium for a hoodie on the resale market? Kazuma Shigematsu, the founder, is not into attention. When we spoke, he wouldn’t allow me to record the conversation. Notes only.
“You mean a better-fitting denim jacket that’s based on an old Levi’s thing? Yeah, OK, sold,” said Jeremy Kirkland, host of the “Blamo!” podcast and the textbook definition of a latter-day Japanese men’s wear guy. Mr. Kirkland, once someone who would allocate his budget to Italian suits, admitted that, recently, over the course of two weeks, he bought four (yes, four) jackets from A.Presse1.
“I’m not really experimenting with my style anymore,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m just wanting really good, basic stuff.”
Basic though these clothes appear, their hook is that they’re opulent to the touch, elevated in their fabrication.
2
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.
3
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
4
“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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.”
-
Maryland2 minutes agoVirginia, Pennsylvania breweries dominate World Beer Cup; MD medals
-
Michigan8 minutes agoLSU big man Jalen Reed commits to Michigan | UM Hoops.com
-
Massachusetts14 minutes agoMassachusetts tops U.S. in AI job loss risk, Tufts report says
-
Minnesota20 minutes agoMinnesota woman detained by ICE needs emergency surgery for tennis ball-sized ovarian cyst, lawmakers say
-
Mississippi26 minutes agoJackson council reviews water authority as Horhn offers few details on plan
-
Missouri32 minutes agoMissouri Senate rejects increase to school funding despite shortfall in state payments
-
Montana38 minutes agoMontana Class AA girls track and field leaders ahead of Optimist Invite
-
Nebraska44 minutes agoToday in History – April 23: Cottonwood named Nebraska’s state tree