Koki Abe and his team were pleased to be on the list of nominees for this year’s LVMH Prize, but it was easy to detect a hint of disappointment that they didn’t make the final shortlist. “[The judges] were impressed by our silhouettes, and liked the Indian embroidery, but kept asking us ‘who are you?’” they said at a walkthrough of their spring collection. “We struggled to explain our identity to them. This collection is about us showing what we learned through that experience.”
And so, onwards. This time around the team took flea markets as the starting point. It was fitting; each season Khoki uses a grab bag of references that orbit loosely around embroidery and tailoring, and shakes them all together in a collaborative effort. See the quilting-print trousers and Cuban collar shirts, faded suits covered in sports patches, and dark tailoring with floral embroidered translucent windows. Everything is fuzzily nostalgic but also somehow sharply contemporary; the kind of thing that you could imagine unearthing at a flea market that would give you a buzz of ‘hey, this is special.’
Khoki’s work is also somewhat akin to a team diary, and the way they draw inspiration can be disarmingly direct. Last season they put maps from a group trip to Europe in jacket linings, and this time they turned their eyes to their recent experience in Paris. “We were laughing because most of the people from LVMH were wearing vintage Carhartt [when we met them],” they said. “So we got inspiration from that too.” Corduroy collared chore jackets and blank beige patches of leather on hoodies were nods to the American workwear brand. It was a fun example of Khoki’s innate cheekiness and resourcefulness; the team knows how to turn lemons into lemonade.
It’s true that the brand’s output can feel a little unrestrained and unwieldy at times, and they’re still ironing out who they are. A little help, then: what the Khoki team does is not really about embroidery or tailoring at all (though they are accomplished at both), but about capturing the analog charm of a group of talented friends putting themselves honestly and fully into the clothes they make. Prize or not, Khoki remains one of menswear’s more interesting under-the-radar brands of the moment.