Tokyo & Copenhagen

Five names that belong to neither of the other lists and have more in common with each other than with anybody else on the rail.

Read the letters

The two cities have nothing in common except the thing that matters here: both produce clothes where the pattern is the idea. No print doing the work, no hardware, no detail that could be removed without the garment ceasing to make sense. It is the hardest kind of clothing to photograph and the easiest to wear, which is a bad combination commercially and the reason we keep this list small.

It is also the part of the shop that customers either walk straight past or buy exclusively. Almost nobody is in between. Eleni can usually tell within ten minutes of a styling session which of the two you are, and she is wrong about twice a season.

The five

A Tokyo house of nine people

Shirting, cut wide and hung from the shoulder rather than the neck. Three shapes, repeated every season for eleven years, with the cloth doing all the changing.

A second Tokyo name — indigo

Dyed in vats that have been running continuously since the 1960s. The colour moves for about two years and then settles, and the letter about it is the longest we have published.

A Copenhagen knitter

Eight machines and one dog. Will not repeat last year’s popular colour on principle, which costs us sales and is the reason we trust the rest of the buy.

A Copenhagen tailor

One coat, made in three lengths, in the same cloth every year. The most expensive single garment we stock and the one with the lowest return rate on the entire rail.

A shoemaker outside Kyoto

Two shapes, unlined, and sized in a way that agrees with nothing else in the shop. We measure feet for these in the shop and will not sell them online.

A warning about sizes

Sizing on this list does not map to European sizing and we do not pretend it does. Everything from these five houses is listed with actual garment measurements in centimetres — chest, shoulder, sleeve, length — and Marília will send you the numbers for anything before you buy it. The Kyoto shoes we will not ship at all until you have been measured, which loses us the sale about half the time and has never once produced a return.