Designed In France, Made In Japan, Coveted By Clothing Nerds
My fellow tinfoil hat-wearers already know that there is a not-so-shadowy cabal of cool, stylish dudes internationally dictating menswear's doings. They may not tell you exactly how to dress but they are setting your pace, incidentally or not.
Exhibit A: Gauthier Borsarello, a well-connected French designer whose L'ETIQUETTE x ÉDIFICE collection is a jumping-off point for a larger consideration.
At least on the surface, though, these are some pretty nice clothes.
ETS.MATERIAUX, an especially Francophile imprint of Japanese retailer ÉDIFICE, has created a collection of Japanese-made Euro workwear and militaria classics that stylistically pull cues from Borsarello's massive archive of vintage clothing.
We're talking wool T-shirts inspired by Italian navy uniforms, a linen pullover like those worn by French seamen many decades ago, and the classic indigo-dyed chore coat.
Great garms, wearable and well-styled on Borsarello in the accompanying imagery. But we're just getting started.
You could look at this collaboration, Borsarello's second offering for Japanese multibrand store ÉDIFICE, as just that. But I see it as an opportunity for a brief study of menswear influence.
For instance, this guy is the fashion director of clothing magazine L'ETIQUETTE, creative director of 50-year-old French fashion house Fursac, curator of a vintage archive rich with age-old Americana, and on it goes. Busy guy but not so busy that he can't occasionally guest on a menswear podcast.
Meanwhile, ETS.MATERIAUX is an extremely low-key Japanese label first envisioned by the eternally hustling Keiji Kaneko, an ÉDIFICE buyer turned perpetual fashion innovator.
Kaneko co-founded the hip boutique L'ECHOPPE, launched vintage-ish store BOUTIQUE, offers creative direction to labels as disparate (but still retro-minded) as chino brand NEAT and Tetsu Nishiyama's DESCENDENT... I could go on. And that's just to start!
Borsarello and Kaneko are not actually in any sort of menswear cabal. But their coming together is indicative of the intersections between fancy-dressin' dudes who exist in a higher plane of stylishness.
These guys don't gather in dark, smoky rooms to discuss the future of Harrington-style jackets and pleated slacks (probably). However, if anyone could decide those kinda things, it'd be them.
After all, they're all chummy, they're all swapin' gossip, they're all consulting on clothes, they're all disseminate their learned taste across social media, indirectly (or not) altering the direction of greater menswear happenings. Their whims are singularly intriguing and collectively potent, and when they align, they often shape a bigger picture.
Borsarello, himself just a dude, makes up a greater wave of well-dressed workwear-y fellows alongside, say, Brut Archive and Wooden Sleepers. They don't coordinate plans, necessarily, but they all help normalize Paraboot shoes and push beat-up denim jeans as an all-purpose uniform.
So, nothing nefarious here. This is the rare cool cabal.
But, back to L'ETIQUETTE x ÉDIFICE. In itself, this ain't gonna change the world. Most people will never know it exists. So many of these kinda projects are just like that. They often aren't documented. They rarely make a ripple.
And yet they still exist as these tangible manifestations of intangible influence felt, gently at first, across the globe.
Look at this as an intriguing cross-cultural handshake, an ultra-insider-y menswear collection made for nerds, by nerds — who just so happen to influence how those other nerds look at clothes.
