A showroom appointment with Kiichiro Asakawa is always good fun. The 37-year-old Stein designer, who is tall, with a mass of curly hair and tinted spectacles, combs through his clothing rails at light speed, excitedly pulling out a leather jacket or cashmere coat and explaining the considerable thought that he put into fabricating each piece.
Asakawa approaches his work like a mad scientist in a laboratory, experimenting with fabrics, textures, and silhouettes, tweaking the weight of a fabric here or a pocket placement there until—eureka!—he has it. “I might see a piece of clothing in a movie that I thought was cool, and the afterimage of that silhouette remains in my mind. But I can’t create that silhouette unless I create the fabric I imagine,” he said. The designer’s experiments are an attempt to work out how to make the perfect images in his mind’s eye a reality.
This season, the eureka moments came through in a series of jeans with twisted seams or elongated darts, an elegant pair of tailored cargo pants, a reversible double-faced wool cardigan, and a brilliantly light and slightly spongy hoodie, which he explained was made of corrugated nylon that had been sandwiched between two layers of cotton jersey “like cardboard,” with tucks sewn in at the sides and back to create a cocoon shape. Cool on the hanger, sure, but when you tried it on, genius! “This time I made things that are more comfortable to wear, but with an elegant mood,” he explained. “It’s about the beauty of being natural, and feeling good about it.”
With experience as a fashion buyer, Asakawa consistently combines his sharp eye for product with a near-pathological obsession with fabrication, and this was another collection that expertly chimed the chic and commercial. No surprise that business is booming—though it was only founded in 2016, the Tokyo-based brand now has 32 global stockists, from Scandinavia to the U.S.
Still, Stein’s laser-focus on making impressive product can mean its larger sense of brand identity sometimes feels undercooked. Asakawa knows how to create formidable clothing; now he needs to finish building the world around it.