Amidst the inevitable summer heatwaves, wearing wool sounds criminal. Surviving summer typically means turning to linen shirts, seersucker suits, and airy cotton shorts, right? Wrong. Tokyo-based clothing label AURALEE poses wool as a transeasonal alternative, something that can be worn year-round regardless of temp.

Wool doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for summer. Typically, it’s woven thick enough for winter and on the rare occasions you do encounter tropical wool, it’s often used for boring suits. But AURALEE thinks outside the box. The Japanese brand’s fabric-first design philosophy has guided its product since the beginning.

Each season, founder Ryota Iwai’s team travels to farms in Australia and New Zealand to hand-select ultra-fine raw fibers. Back in Japan, fabric experts combine these into custom-spun original yarns that specialty Japanese mills process using high-density weaves, pressure-kettle presses, and natural liquid coatings, eco-friendly treatments that reinforce, dye, and protect the yarn.

And that’s only how AURALEE makes its lightweight wool — although, its custom cottons and cashmeres go through similarly obsessive processes.

AURALEE’s most commonly utilized specialty wool is appropriately named SUPER LIGHT WOOL and defines seasonal-forward staples that aren’t sweat inducing.

Case in point: a classic collared shirt that appears structured but is actually cut to be both loose and breathable. A slightly thicker but still lightweight velvet iteration of AURALEE’s wool informs a padded overcoat — perfect for transitional weather. And it’s not just wool that defines AURALEE's success; rather, the wool is part of the paradigm for Iwai’s approach to challenging compositional conventions.

A breezy ripstop shirt is made from a nylon that undergoes a proprietary jet-dyeing process at the same Japanese mills. A specialized twill is created through weaving a scarce, extra-long-staple Egyptian cotton yarn at a high density, then applying a dye process to harden it. Even AURALEE’s cashmere starts with sourcing rare fibers in Mongolia before being woven into moleskin.

In AURALEE’s world, material has no mold. Wool becomes an all-climate textile and nylon is see-through soft. Clothing is merely the canvas for the fabric — a canvas denoted by relaxed silhouettes and muted color palette — but a damn good canvas at that.

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