He ruined the shirt for me

U t-shirts on sale for $9.90 uniqlo.com/us/en/u-crew-neck-short-sleeve-t-shirt-422992.html?dwvar_422992_color=COL02&cgid=

Copped

uniqlo.com/us/en/search?q=Open%20Collar&quickView=427317
On sale for $15 🤷🏽‍♀️ sized down on the one i ordered

reminds me of the stussy shirt i got last year

I have the one u talking about in black lol

where tf are the airism masks

still waiting on these too

hypebeast.com/2020/7/uniqlo-airism-bedding-release

Oh im in uniqlo really #1

did you size down for a normal fit? i fw with the oversized look

i sized down one, but it hasnt come in yet so i cant tell u much bout the fit srry

all good homie I'll roll the dice

Airism all summer

The United Nations of Uniqlo

Can a Japanese label famous for its simplicity take over the fashion world?

In 1998 a provincial Japanese clothing company known for flogging imported brands like Nike and Adidas opened its first shop in an upmarket district of Tokyo. Surprisingly, it chose a zip-up fleece as its new signature line. Until that point, fleeces had been expensive items usually worn by climbers, hikers and other outdoorsy types who had little interest in fashion. But Uniqlo’s fleece, which by the following year came in 50 colours from lavender to burgundy, was an immediate hit. Launched in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, the top was noteworthy because it was so cheap – it sold for just ¥1,900 ($19), around half the price of those in other shops. Two million were sold within 12 months. Within two years, enough fleeces had been bought to clothe nearly a third of the population of Japan.

A couple of decades on and the fleece that changed everything hasn’t changed much. The piping now hugs the wrists for extra warmth and the side pockets are angled downwards, making it easier to defrost your hands. The price has increased by less than a dollar, even though the technology has been refined. Uniqlo was the first clothing company to use special C-shaped fibres that capture dead air, which the company claims makes the fleece 1.5°C toastier than others on the market. Minerals have been added to the material that supposedly transform the sun’s heat into infra-red emissions to make the item even warmer.

Uniqlo’s parent firm, Fast Retailing, is now the world’s third-largest clothing company, after Inditex (which owns Zara) and h&m. Its success has been driven by technology, both the fruits of the company’s own research and developments that have transformed the way people live and work. Even before the outbreak of coronavirus, advances in communications and cloud computing meant that the professional classes could do their jobs anywhere. Dress codes have become less formal. One sign of this shift is the shrinking market for office attire: according to Euromonitor, a research group, sales of men’s suits in America shrank by 14% in value from 2013-18. The rise in athleisure – gym kit worn as everyday clothing – means that we now work out and hang out in the same gear. The covid-19 pandemic has only hastened the decline of what we once called “workwear”. Casual clothes of the type Uniqlo offers, in which you can both take a Zoom barre class and watch Netflix, have become ubiquitous.

@ChampayneKudo check PMs quick

Unusually for a clothing company, Uniqlo measures its significant milestones not in iconic outfits but in manufacturing breakthroughs. After its success with the fleece, Uniqlo rolled out more product lines that were distinguished by their functionality: a first-of-its-kind bra top with sewn-in cups, thermal underwear, moisture-wicking fabric and lightweight puffer coats filled with down. It sold more than 11m warm, easily packable “Ultra Light Down” pieces in the two years after they were launched in 2009. The vests in this range are especially popular with finance bros the world over.

An industrial operation called Toray, which is just outside the city of Kyoto, has been at the heart of these hi-tech innovations (it is best known for developing the carbon fibre used in Boeing’s Dreamliner aeroplanes). Uniqlo’s founder, Yanai Tadashi, approached the head of Toray in the late 1990s to develop the material used in the fleece. Today over 1,000 researchers there work on inventing new fabrics. Yanai initially envisioned Uniqlo as a Japanese version of Gap, selling simple, functional clothes. But over the past decade Yanai’s company has grown internationally and outstripped the label that inspired it. A brand that started by selling American sportswear to the Japanese has ended up selling Japanese ingenuity to the world.

Every day Yanai Tadashi comes to work in the same $15 navy-blue Merino-wool crew-neck jumper. This is significant for two reasons. First, Uniqlo’s offerings are versatile enough to suit anyone from a billionaire to a Brooklyn barista. Second, though Yanai became rich through fashion, he isn’t obsessed with it. He grew up above his father’s clothing shop in Ube, a small town in western Japan, but “never felt any value associated with clothes”, he told me matter-of-factly when we spoke by phone earlier this year (the coronavirus outbreak put paid to our plans to meet in person).

As a child Yanai was scared of his father, who would beat him for not finishing his breakfast quickly or spending too much time reading after bedtime. But a sense of duty lured him home after he graduated from university and he took over the family enterprise as its employees began to retire. Yanai resolved to “commit to the business, everything I had, with determination”. As he sees it, this drive was shared by many people in his generation, who grew up with the memory of the country’s ruinous defeat in the second world war and were determined to prove themselves. He grumbles that younger Japanese lack “inspiration”, as he calls it. Aged 70, he continues to work as hard as ever: our appointment was set for 7am and it isn’t unusual for him to arrange meetings even earlier in the day.

But Yanai also chose to overturn almost everything his father had created. When he took the reins in 1984, the company had 22 shops across Japan. His father was a tailor who made all the clothes in-house. Yanai instead imported well-known American labels. The chain’s new name, Unique Clothing Warehouse, was intentionally ironic (it was shortened to Uniqlo in 1988). Branches of Uniqlo proliferated outside the big cities. According to the most important metrics, Yanai’s pivot was a huge success: by its tenth anniversary, Uniqlo was Japan’s fastest-growing retailer and Yanai had become the country’s richest individual (he has jostled for the title ever since with Son Masayoshi, the chief executive of SoftBank). Many Japanese, though, regarded the brand as provincial and cheap.

In 1995 the chain launched a campaign, “Say something bad about Uniqlo, Get ¥1m”, which triggered nearly 10,000 complaints about everything from the poor quality of the discounted clothes to the sub-standard customer service. “To be known for being cheap is sad,” Yanai has said. He knew he needed to return the company to its roots by taking the manufacture of clothing back in-house.

Yanai, who had spent time in Britain and America, was impressed by Next, a British retailer that in the 1980s became one of the first stores to sell well-made, stylish clothes at affordable prices. Yanai wondered whether he could do something similar in Japan. He realised that Uniqlo would have to take charge of every stage of the manufacturing process. He instigated the collaboration with Toray and drew on Japan’s rich tradition of textile design (few things get Yanai as animated as discussing the history of Japanese textile exports). As significantly, he became one of the first Japanese clothing entrepreneurs to turn to Chinese factories to make goods on a mass scale. Once a production line had been established, a million items could be stitched together with little more effort than it took to produce 5,000. The combination of cheap labour and bulk orders allowed Uniqlo to keep prices low.

Yanai was less sure-footed when it came to launching shops abroad. “When we first opened in China, we offered pseudo-Uniqlo at a cheaper cost, but that was never accepted by Chinese consumers,” he said. The company’s first forays into America and Britain also failed (Yanai has written a number of business-strategy books, the most famous of which translates as “One Win, Nine Losses”). Yanai had thought he needed to tailor the shop’s offerings to each country. But it turned out that Chinese consumers, like Americans, Brits and others, just wanted “great access to a great product”.

Today the ubiquity and predictability of Uniqlo’s products are part of the brand’s identity, an essential component of Yanai’s aspiration to become “the first truly global clothing brand from Asia”. The company won’t even disclose which items or colours sell best in any of the 25 countries it operates in. Thermal wear, I was told, sells as well in tropical Singapore and mild Melbourne as in colder climes (the only difference a company spokesperson would concede was that sizing for Western customers is bigger than for Asian ones). Yanai believes that globalisation and the rise in international travel has led to a confluence of taste across the world. Hipsters in India and Vietnam want to wear the same clothes as their peers in Tokyo and Paris. “Very few retailers tend to think this way because they focus on their own country’s clothing only,” he said.

But Yanai is not complacent enough to believe that Uniqlo has cracked the problem of global fashion. On the wall of his office there is a photo taken of a crowded pavement on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1947, which at the time was the most modern city in the world. Men wear suits, women wear gloves, everyone is in a hat. “As time goes by, how people styled themselves went through a dramatic change,” Yanai said. “We need to be prepared for what happens next.”

Last year, I visited Uniqlo’s vast global headquarters in Ariake, an industrial district of Tokyo, to understand in more detail how the company had reinvented itself. In a handsome communal library featuring a spiral staircase, a shelf of Yanai’s books and a café selling green tea and piping out soft jazz, I met Katsuta Yukihiro, Uniqlo’s head of research and development. Katsuta began his career working for luxury companies such as Bergdorf Goodman, Ralph Lauren and Barney’s. But he began to notice that, like a growing number of people around the world, he preferred to spend his money on experiences rather than status symbols. “People used to work hard to get more money to buy a Rolex. Now people go to Whole Foods, buy organic food, cook in the kitchen. People’s satisfaction has changed from buying material goods to something more mental,” he said. (Katsuta wears an understated Swatch.)

In 2005 Katsuta jumped ship to Uniqlo at a time when the retailer was better known for selling socks and underwear than anything more fashionable (underwear or “innerwear”, in Uniqlo’s coy locution, still accounts for a substantial amount of the company’s sales). “Half of my friends in the industry thought I got fired because...Japanese people didn’t recognise it as good taste, or as a fashion company,” he recalled. There was even a derogatory slang term associated with the brand: uni-bare, meaning “you’ve been caught wearing Uniqlo”. The quality was decent, Katsuta said, but the clothes needed “spice”.

The firm made a concerted effort to court high-profile designers and, in 2009, it announced its first collaboration. Collaborations were already common on the high street: Karl Lagerfeld’s partnership with h&m had begun five years earlier. Uniqlo’s was different. The designer was Jil Sander, a German minimalist, and the association gave the company much needed cachet among the fashion set. Tomas Maier, the designer at Bottega Veneta who himself became a partner further down the line, told the New York Times that the Sander collaboration “opened the door for a lot of people to look at Uniqlo”.

The Sander collaboration lasted five seasons. Since then, Uniqlo has established many other partnerships with designers such as JW Anderson, Christophe Lemaire (who after two seasons came in-house to design the edgier U diffusion line) and Alexander Wang. What they all have in common is a preference for the “intellectual” over the “hot”, according to Vanessa Friedman, fashion critic at the New York Times. Other collaborations catered to specific kinds of customers: kurtas (collarless shirts) for the Delhi store from Rina Singh, an Indian designer, and a line of modest wear for countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia with large Muslim populations. The perception of unsophisticated provincialism had been shed.

The intellectual approach extends to the unveiling of the company’s collections each year. Rather than host catwalk shows, Uniqlo organises an annual “exhibition”. Last year’s, which was held at Somerset House in London, featured various “experimental zones” including a tunnel constructed from airism fabric, one of Uniqlo’s trademarked fabric innovations, and a mirrored room displaying the full spectrum of Uniqlo sock colours on the feet of disembodied mannequins.