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Ssstein’s Kiichiro Asakawa is Japan’s high wizard of quiet luxury, and over the past few years he’s transformed his brand into a subtle force to be reckoned with. Having started in 2016 with just three pairs of trousers, ssstein (with three s’s as of last season) now offers a smorgasbord of excellent wardrobe staples that are beloved by buyers from Seoul to Switzerland. Most talked-about are its gorgeous coats, made from rich, glossy wools that ripple with consummate chic.
This season marked something of a step-up for the brand, and it showed in Paris for the first time, to a modest standing audience at the Palais de Tokyo. The recipient of this year’s Fashion Prize of Tokyo—which exists to help Japanese designers expand their international reach—Asakawa will show his collections for ssstein in Paris both this season and next. As well as the clout this will bring, it also means a great opportunity for Asakawa to flex his creative muscles in a new setting.
This was, as usual, a collection of beautiful clothes—his trademark trench coats were there, as were plenty of other brilliantly wearable pieces (from super-clean shirts to intentionally dirtied denim and cargo pants)—but the reliance on the usual suspects made it hard to shake the feeling that ssstein had played it safe.
“This season started with me looking at my favorite photo books and thinking about the distance between the photographer and the models,” Asakawa explained after the show. “I wanted to express the natural yet soft, very careful and warm, beautiful side of that [interaction].” Though the designer was talking in the abstract, the best bits of the collection were indeed the parts that had something of the warm, natural and soft to them: the contrasting wools that were sometimes fuzzy and sometimes smooth, the layered lapels, and the strangely appealing pipe-belts. Less successful was a stiff-looking leather corset belt, and blazers with overly oversized shoulders that, when combined with a high turtleneck, dwarfed the head.
Those small nitpicks aside, Asakawa’s knack for making quality, sellable product is undeniable. “I wanted to make clothes you can casually wear on your doorstep but that somehow feel very elegant,” he explained. Doorstep elegance—it has a nice ring to it.
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