Kenji
A good jacket is a quiet thing. You notice the man, not the cloth.
Where it started
Kenji grew up in Osaka over his family's dry cleaners. He spent his childhood pressing other men's suits and reading the labels inside them.
What they wanted
He wanted to design for the big fashion houses in Paris. He moved there at twenty-two and worked his way into a design studio.
The wall
He spent four years drawing collections that were cut, sewn and fitted by other people in other countries. He never touched the fabric.
The moment it clicked
His father mailed him an old jacket with a note asking him to fix the lining. Kenji took the whole thing apart on his kitchen table in Paris and spent a week rebuilding it by hand. When he finished, it was the first thing he had made in four years that he could hold. He wanted to make clothes, not drawings of clothes.
The new path
He moved back to Japan and apprenticed under an old tailor in Ginza who took two apprentices a decade.
The hard part
The old man made him sew buttonholes for a year before he let him cut a single pattern.
The breakthrough
When his teacher retired, he left Kenji the shop, the shears and the client book.
Today
Kenji makes about sixty suits a year by hand in a narrow shop in Ginza. He chalks every pattern wearing the Ginza frame, and his customers have started asking where it came from.
This is Kenji's locked face. Every photo and video of his starts from it, so his look stays the same everywhere his appears.
Aiko
Mei
Ren