“Authentic Source. Among Shapes. At the Seams. A Singular Form.”
These aren’t just phrases; they're the four foundational pillars of AS, a mysterious new Japanese brand launched with barely more than a whisper this year. On the strength of two lowkey collections alone — a “pre-debut” Issue 000 in March and an official Issue 001 release in early September, attended by a select few buyers and press — AS has already become one of the more interesting brands to emerge from Japan’s crowded fashion scene.
The gist is this: elements of European workwear, military clothes, and tailoring are given a more playful spin through overlapping collars, slightly askew buttons and zippers, and other little details. In practice, that’s produced pieces like a sumptuous leather jacket, its lambskin molded into a kind of cross between a flight and biker silhouette. This was the piece that stopped me mid-scroll, sending me on a journey towards the center of this brand’s embryonic world.
As its scant press notes explain, AS is driven by a singular goal of finding the middle ground between the two extremes of modern menswear: clothes tend to be either too basic, to the point of being devoid of the wearer’s personality, or too niche, requiring special knowledge to fully grasp the depth of what you’re wearing.
Out of this frustration grew AS, but don’t think of it as a rebuke. “I didn’t start AS to fight against what already exists — I wanted to introduce a slightly different current into that mature landscape,” the founder explains. “Many of the strongest Japanese brands today are less interested in adding decoration and more focused on fabric, construction, proportion, and ultimately imagining the person who will wear the clothes.”
It's as noble a goal as any when starting a brand, but this nascent label's intrigue doesn’t come just from being months old and having a touch more than 1,000 Instagram followers; it also comes from the backstory of its founder — or lack thereof. See, AS is the work of a fashion industry veteran who happens to be completely anonymous, someone who purposefully stays in the shadows while designing every piece. All that’s known is that he — and yes, it seems to be a he — is a self-taught designer who has run another brand for more than a decade and helped launch one of Tokyo’s top appointment-only clothing shops.
He's also very friendly and extremely thoughtful, as we learned over a month-long email exchange meant to flesh out what AS is. From the brand’s home base in Tokyo’s Minami-Aoyama neighborhood, an upscale slice of the city home to everything from major maisons to AURALEE, the founder spoke with us about first impressions, strangeness, and the “addictive” discoveries hidden in the seemingly simple clothes.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
What does working anonymously on this brand make possible for you after a decade of publicly running another label?
Keeping the designer anonymous let me temporarily separate my career and identity from the clothes. I wanted people to look at the object first, rather than who made it. I also wanted to reconsider the relationship between the maker and the buyer. When you run a brand for a long time, the question slowly shifts from “What do I want to make?” to “What do I need to make so that someone will buy it?” I became tired of that.
With AS, I want to work with people who genuinely feel they want to build something together. Next year, we’re limiting our wholesale partners to only three. We choose who we work with, and I want them to feel that AS is something they truly want to carry.
And what’s the first impression you want to make with AS?
The clothing itself, of course. Beyond that, a sense of warmth. Calmness and passion. Quietness and richness.
You helped launch one of Tokyo's leading select shops. How did that experience shape your understanding of running a brand?
My experience may be a little unusual. At the shop I was involved with, the idea wasn't simply to wait for people to wander in and then see what they chose. Early on, we thought about how to give someone a reason to come to the store in the first place. Making something good and creating the conditions for it to be understood as good are two different jobs. I consider both of them to be design.
What does a well-dressed adult in Tokyo reach for that's hard to find right now, and where does playfulness fit?
As you get older, ordinary starts to feel not quite enough, but you don’t want to go too far either. You want a little tension without looking like you’re trying too hard. Naturally, that leads people toward good materials, calm silhouettes, and restrained details. There is nothing wrong with that, but the result is that many brands can begin to feel similar.
We want to create something that makes you think, “I can wear this, but there is something slightly strange about it.” You look again and notice something is different. You put it on and realize it is more playful than you first thought — but it never feels like the clothes are wearing you. That very narrow space is what we are looking for.
I genuinely love clothes, probably to an excessive degree, and I think that curiosity becomes the playfulness inside AS.
The Maris jacket, your central piece in Issue 001, has a pocket that began as an iPad sketch and stayed almost completely untouched through production. Why was it important to protect that gesture?
Early on, I felt Maris could become a signature piece for AS. The pocket mattered because it was the detail that could define the entire jacket. So rather than leaving it as a vague sketch, I drew the shape myself on the iPad at close to actual scale and tried to preserve that line as directly as possible in the final garment.
Normally, lines become cleaner and more corrected as a design moves toward production. Here, I felt it was more important to protect the original intuition. Interestingly, at the showroom, the pocket became one of the details that received the strongest response from both media and industry people. Many people reacted to it before I even explained anything. That made me very happy.
Many of your details, like the Watch Cuffs, the washi lining and the neck eyelets, only reveal themselves in wear. How do you hope people come to discover AS?
I would like AS to feel almost like air — something you’ve been breathing before you consciously notice it. You don’t normally think about air, but once it disappears, you immediately understand how essential it was.
I want the details in AS to feel just as natural. Rather than everything announcing itself immediately, I want people to discover things gradually as they live with the clothes. The Watch Cuffs, the washi lining, the eyelets are all small devices for creating those moments. Ideally, those small discoveries accumulate over time until the clothes become a little addictive.
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