Shinsuke Takizawa spent eight years directing design at Major Force, the Tokyo hip-hop label run by streetwear pioneer Hiroshi Fujiwara, before he ever ran a clothing brand of his own. In 1994, he left to start Neighborhood in Tokyo’s Harajuku…
Alexandra Waldman had a fashion background. Polina Veksler had spent her career in finance. In 2015, the two friends combined those skill sets to launch Universal Standard, a New York-based womenswear brand built around a simple premise: every style, in…
Toshikiyo Hirata built his first denim factory in 1984 in Kojima, the Japanese district known as the country’s denim capital. He opened his own store a year later, selling jeans made with techniques he had studied on trips through the…
Norse Projects began as a skate shop and art gallery in Copenhagen, not a fashion label. Three friends, Tobia Sloth, Anton Juul, and Mikkel Grønnebæk, opened the store in 2004 and spent five years curating other brands before designing their…
Denim Tears turned a single motif into one of the most culturally significant streetwear brands of the past decade. Founder Tremaine Emory built the label around one idea: clothing can carry history, and history can carry weight most brands avoid…
Long before Tiffosi sold a single pair of its own jeans, the company behind it was already an expert in denim. Cofemel, founded in Vila Nova de Gaia in the late 1970s, spent over a decade as a subcontractor, washing…
In 1951, a failed oilcloth factory in Helsinki became the birthplace of one of the most recognizable print houses in the world. Marimekko had no fashion background, no design pedigree, and no plan beyond turning leftover fabric machinery into something…
Come Tees is not run by a team, an agency, or even a small studio. It is one artist, working out of Los Angeles, turning deadstock fabric and vintage workwear into pieces that Rihanna and Kanye West have both been…
Chinatown Market is one of the few streetwear brands to change its name under public pressure, lose itself under new ownership, and then buy itself back to become the brand it started as. That full arc, name change and all,…
Online Ceramics sells no ceramics. The name was a misdirection from the start, a small inside joke that stuck around long after two friends stopped selling bootleg tie-dye shirts out of a van in concert parking lots. What began as…