Mame Kurogouchi and the Aoyama Studio

Mame Kurogouchi started her eponymous label in Tokyo in 2010, after seven years at Issey Miyake. The label, which operates out of a small studio in Aoyama and shows in Paris, has become over fifteen years one of the more significant Japanese fashion houses of its generation — the brand is stocked at Dover Street Market, the collaborations (Uniqlo, Adidas, NikeLab) have been serious rather than merely commercial, the runway shows have been received with the kind of measured respect that Paris gives to serious work rather than the exclamation-heavy enthusiasm it reserves for the trend-adjacent. What Kurogouchi does, both in her eponymous work and in the Aoyama studio where the work is made, is worth paying attention to for reasons that are more interesting than most fashion press coverage suggests.

The Aoyama studio is the starting point. Kurogouchi has been based in the same district of Tokyo since she started the label, and the studio itself has been in roughly the same configuration for most of that time: a workspace above a showroom, with a team that has grown slowly from a handful of designers and pattern cutters to perhaps twenty people, most of whom have been there for a decade or more. The low staff turnover is unusual for fashion; the specific work culture Kurogouchi has built, from what she has said in interviews and from what has come through in the pieces themselves, is unusual for Tokyo fashion specifically.

What she is doing in the studio, as a designer, is the thing that distinguishes the work from the several other Japanese women designers of her generation. The collections are built around a specific working relationship with Japanese craftspeople: textile weavers, embroiderers, dyers, specific workshops that Kurogouchi has developed long-term partnerships with over the years. A season's collection will typically involve five or six of these relationships, each contributing a specific technique or material to a small number of garments. The rest of the collection is built around the anchors these collaborations provide.

This is a different design methodology from how most international fashion houses work. The dominant model — the one Italian and French houses use, the one that American fashion has largely adopted — is that the designer designs, fabric is sourced from mills that the house has relationships with, and garments are manufactured at scale. The Japanese tradition has always included a second model, in which the designer works directly with specific craftspeople whose techniques are part of the design itself. Issey Miyake built his house on that model. Kurogouchi, who trained there, has extended it.

The specific techniques that come through the studio's work are the kind that do not reproduce in mass production. A silk jacquard from the textile atelier in Kyoto that Kurogouchi has been working with since 2014, woven on a loom that produces a particular kind of surface that industrial looms cannot replicate. A traditional indigo dye process applied to cotton, from a workshop in Tokushima that takes several weeks to dye a single batch. Embroidery done by hand, by embroiderers in a Kyoto workshop, on specific pieces that are priced accordingly.

What the final garments actually look like, as a result of all this: they are quiet in the specific Japanese sense. The silhouettes are usually straightforward — a coat, a dress, a blouse, trousers — with the specific character of the piece held in the textile and the small construction details rather than in bold cut or ostentatious branding. The fabric is the point. You see, on close inspection, what the weaving and the dyeing and the embroidery have produced, and the garment is a frame for that inspection.

This is not work that photographs well on Instagram. This is part of its argument. The pieces reveal themselves in person, at close range, and the customer who has picked up a Mame Kurogouchi coat in the shop understands within a minute of handling it that the coat is doing something that the comparable French or Italian coat at the same price is not doing. The coat continues to reveal, over years of wear, details that were not apparent in the first wearing. The embroidery that turns out to be slightly different on each side. The weave that, in certain light, shows a pattern that is not visible in normal light. These details are not accidents. They are the reason the garment took the time it took to make.

The commercial proposition is harder than the eponymous houses working in louder registers. Kurogouchi's pieces are expensive — a coat starts at around three thousand euros, the more elaborately woven or embroidered pieces run significantly higher — but the customer base is a specific one, smaller than the international houses at equivalent price points, and the house has grown deliberately rather than rapidly. This is consistent with the working methodology. A studio that is built around long-term craftsperson relationships cannot scale the way a fashion house built on industrial supply chains can. The ceiling is lower. The work, at the ceiling, is more specific.

What Kurogouchi's work demonstrates, beyond itself, is that there is still a functioning model for fashion houses that operate at small scale with serious craft, outside the Italian and French traditions that have dominated the top of the international luxury market for the last half-century. The model requires specific conditions — the Japanese craft economy is one of the few in the world that has preserved the technical base this kind of collaboration requires — and it does not produce the kind of growth that international luxury investors typically look for. But it produces garments that are not available elsewhere.

For the customer who has learned to read what the textiles and the construction are doing, this is enough. Kurogouchi's pieces are worn by a specific international customer who knows what she is looking at. The house is stocked in the shops where that customer looks. The collections come out twice a year, at a scale that does not strain the studio's capacity, and the shows in Paris are watched with attention by the people who are watching carefully.

Go to the Aoyama showroom if you are in Tokyo. Handle the coats. Notice what the silk jacquard does in the light. The work answers the questions the customer needs to ask about why it costs what it costs. It will, and the customer who has handled it once usually does not need to ask again.