Kiichiro Asakawa is a softly spoken polymath that takes an overhead, almost scientific view of fashion rather than an introspective one. This is partly informed by his retail background. In addition to his brand Stein, he also runs the Shibuya-based clothing boutique Carol, which he continues to do some of the buying for (though he admitted his design work for Stein is taking up more and more time).
This season, the designer continued with his theme of “removing” the masculinity from men’s staples by softening them up, and so the neat shirts and jackets had their seams moved further down the arm to round off their edges.
Trouser and coat hems fell low and were cut in a very subtle trapezoid shape, so that they gently billowed with each step as the models walked around the atrium of Tokyo’s Telecom Center Building. “I wanted to give the lengths of the coats and trousers a connection with the ground, to try and create an elegant atmosphere,” he said by way of explanation.
Double-waisted jeans may have looked like a design gimmick we’ve seen before, but Asakawa freshened them up with a contrasting use of fabrics that combined ’60s and ’90s ways of making denim (Asakawa also designs most of the textiles himself). “If you wear them for a long time then the denim will fade in different ways, and the contrast will come out,” he said.
Stein deals in what Japanese fashion journalists neatly refer to as riaru kurōzu, or “real clothes”—a market term that best translates to accessible, everyday pieces. Asakawa’s obsessive attention to detail, however, lends his “real clothes” a quality that pushes them beyond the norm. The way those V-neck knits were gently rounded at the neckline, for example, or the buttons stitched on high vents on the side of the floaty trench coats, made them worthy of a second look.
