When asked why he chose the name TUKI for his brand, Kosuke Harada says: “'Tuki' means ‘moon’ in Japanese. I love looking at the moon.” In an industry that tends to over-explain, Harada’s directness feels almost radical. The stripped-down, purpose-driven clothes he makes feel exactly the same.
Based in Okayama City, Harada launched the brand together with his wife, Sayoko Noritake, in 2005. Both entered fashion without formal training – Harada majored in American literature, and Noritake took on a design job straight out of junior college, honing her skills through practice. They met while working at a small company in the Kojima district of Okayama, famed for its denim.
Harada looks at their DIY path into fashion as an advantage. “I think it has helped me think for myself and not fall into the industry’s echo chamber.” Twenty years later, Harada and Noritake continue to operate on their own singular terms. Their website still runs on a Tumblr server, they skip fashion weeks, their seasonal collections comprise mostly the same repeated silhouettes, and contact with the stores stocking the brand is often restricted to phone. That makes sense because all of TUKI’s roughly 50 current stockists are located in Japan, including BEAMS, Localers and Brownie. “Of course, we would like to work overseas, but we won’t force it,” Harada says. “I don’t like chatting with lots of people anyway.”
Until recently, TUKI was a pants-only brand. In its latest collection, Spring/Summer 2026, which also contains T-shirts, a work jacket and an anorak, most pieces are pants: sleeping pants, work pants, long pants, jog shorts, and jodhpurs. That’s deliberate. “Bottoms have always been my favorite piece of clothing,” says Harada. “But the reason we focus on them runs deeper. With the exception of Italian wool pants and selvedge denim jeans, pants were not held in high esteem in fashion when we started. We wanted to change that and let the bottom take center stage rather than have a supportive role.
“Besides,” he adds, “we were, and still are, reluctant to offer ‘outfits.’ We only want to create the tools to build them,” implying that pants fulfill that function like nothing else. It explains TUKI’s “collectible costumes” moniker: The brand, as Harada sees it, doesn’t create trendy looks but stand-alone garments with the long-term relevance typical of functional objects.
Harada likes philosophizing about pants as much as he likes designing them. “When compared to other categories of clothing,” he says, “pants resemble furniture. They need to look good but shouldn’t break, which means structural calculations and aesthetic design must always go hand in hand.” A friend of his once compared TUKI’s clothes to a desk. “I think he was right,” says Harada. “I mean, it’s rare to replace an item like that every month, or even every year, right?”
The first pants TUKI released were a pair of slim white jeans. Since then, the silhouettes have grown wider but denim pants have remained TUKI’s signature. Its styles have also expanded to include more diverse models like the “0054 Type 2,” a loose-fit denim overall, and the “0032 Type 3,” a similarly baggy jeans. “For a long time, I had never worn a wide silhouette myself,” says Harada. “At first I wasn’t particularly good at designing one either. Through prototyping, I discovered a new side of myself that was a bit more eccentric.”
It helped him arrive at a style like the “0032,” introduced in 2011. A bold, even slightly crazy design, it remains TUKI’s most in-demand item. “I wanted to create a sculptural, three-dimensional silhouette that wasn’t like any jeans I knew and departed from dominant ideas about what jeans could be,” he explains.
That’s no exaggeration: the “0032”, constructed from textured 14oz Japanese cotton denim, is a wide, almost bulbous sailor-shaped pant that features an extended front panel folded at the fly that covers the hips and upper thighs, a deep rise, cropped legs, and a short, folded up hem. It’s different from any pair of pants you’ve ever seen before and, yet, to TUKI, it’s a staple jean.
All TUKI’s clothes are produced at factories in Japan. “Because of the local feel of Japanese production, brands producing in Japan sometimes lean on qualities like ‘tradition’, ‘rarity’ and ‘handmade.’ I don’t like that approach, which I consider a commercialization of culture. I see TUKI as doing the exact opposite,” Harada says. Against the current tide of small-batch menswear, he prefers the feeling of mass production over small-scale artisanal handwork. “I know it’s hard to control quality in a factory, but that’s exactly why I like it.”
There’s a factory-like consistency to TUKI’s offerings as well. While it does produce seasonal collections, a large part of the line remains available year-round. It means that some pieces have been in continuous production for over twenty seasons now. “That’s probably quite rare these days,” says Harada with a wink.
