NYC Market Week SS15 Pt. 4 - Brand With a Vengeance

It’s been a long four days with over 5,000 words and 300 photos, but we’ve arrived at the fourth and final installment of our coverage on the SS15 collections on display at New York City’s Market Week.

We’ve already gone over the offerings from The Kingpins Show, Liberty Fairs, and Capsule, now it’s time to dig into what was at MAN as well as selected showroom visits from 3sixteen, visvim, and Burgus Plus.

The Hill-Side

The Hill-Side began in 2009 as the side project of Hickoree’s owners Emil and Sandy Corsillo. For the first five years they made their name with ties, pocket squares, and scarves in traditional Japanese fabrics, and built up over a hundred stockists worldwide.

Then last season dropped, and they made the leap from accessories into a full line of shirts, shoes, and outerwear. Changes for next Spring/Summer aren’t nearly as dramatic, but shows that a keen eye for textiles and adhering to design fundamentals can make for a very strong collection.

TH-S started out with sneakers last season, and now compliment them with a full line of espadrilles. There have been a few attempts at selvedge denim footwear, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it work.

The fibrous nature of the sole gives a texture that compliments the denim, the unstructured nature of the upper lets the 10oz. denim lay and drape naturally, and the exposed selvedge adds color while also serving it’s intended purpose–keeping the exposed edges from fraying.

Like this? Read these:

Make Your Own Jeans Masterclass with Mohsin Sajid Hosted by Blackhorse Lane Ateliers

LONG JOHN Worn-Out Projects – Raw Denim Event

There are quite a few new casual and tailored jackets coming out in a variety of fabrics as well. The standout was this take on a 1960s flight jacket, complete with all the requisite pockets, zips, and gussets.

And in the same way they were using patterns and fabrics across multiple garments, they’re now doing across multiple mediums.

You can get a full Hill-Side set of Japanese ceramics, and use them while wearing your matching Hill-Side shirt.

But most importantly, they’re making jeans.

This pair is produced and sourced entirely in Japan and is made from a one-wash unsanforized selvedge denim. The fit is slim-straight, retail will be less than $200, and it should be out well before next summer.

LA panoplie

LA panoplie is a new French brand that feels like a tropical version of fellow Parisians A.P.C..

The denim was fairly plain and regular, but included some fun details like a lined rear yoke and a tricolor selvedge line.

The rest of the line revolved around nautical blues and safari green and khaki.

Nanamica

The wizards at Japanese label Nanamica have been stealthily integrating tech and performance fabrics into otherwise casual clothing for years now. This season, they’ve turned their attention to denim.

This denim is the first to blend cotton and Coolmax fibers into a selvedge jean. It has the same weight and feel as an all cotton pair, but breathes and wicks moisture like Coolmax. Now there’s no excuse to stop going raw in the summer.

Another seemingly impossible feat is their raw denim raincoat, which sounds like a horrible idea at first, but they’ve taken the effort to fuse denim fabric with Gore-Tex to create a jacket that’s waterproof and breathable but is still capable of amazing fades.

This sample has weathered a year of wear.

Apolis

Apolis’s line of indigo-dyed wool and cotton remains pretty much the same.

One new standout was this shirt, which has a camo pattern woven into its surface before it’s indigo-dyed.

The result is a very subtly textured material with loads of color depth and only the faintest trace of it’s camo pattern. Imagine that, camo that actually blends in!

3sixteen

As 3sixteen crosses the eleven year mark this summer, you really have to admire the patience and restraint they’ve shown in expanding their line. Instead of sampling the selvedge buffet from a variety of denims and mills, Andrew and Johan worked with Kuroki Mills to create their own proprietary fabric–something unheard of for a company of their size.

They’ve stood strongly behind their 100X denim for four years now and built a modular line around three different fits and a handful of variations on the original fabric.

Andrew Chen and 3sixteen sales director Errol Ng

Below is their latest spin on 100X, the 100XK. The K stands for “kibata”, which our Japanese literate readers will know means loomstate or unsanforized.

Sanforized 100x denim (left), unsanforized loomstate 100xk denim (right)

The Kibata denim is very similar to the standard 100X, but they didn’t just grab it before it his the sanforizing machines. Kuroki weaves the denim at a lower tension to add more irregularity and character, they’re also unsinged so good and hairy as well.

Unpunched rivets add a Japanese workwear touch

They’re also doing it in Shadow Selvedge 120XK.

Unsanforized 120xk denim (left), sanforized 120x denim (right)

Lack of processing also gives the Kibata Shadow greater color variation and depth, it really comes out in direct light. Both Kibata denims will release this fall and retail for the same price as their sanforized counterparts.

Spring/summer items on offer include summer-weight flannels to compliment the winter ones we saw in January and an indigo linen popover.

3sixteen’s also about ready to drop their jacket, but they’re not ready to show a full pic of the sample so you’ll have to settle for a Godzilla-like close-up that suggests the rest of it’s magnitude. But we can tell you it’s a Type III variant with hand pockets (corduroy lined, no less), no waist tabs, the same triangular cut yoke as on their work shirts, and that it comes in double black and shadow selvedge.

They also had some great customer fades on hand.

We’re suckers for cuff fades on dark weft denim.

visvim

I don’t completely understand visvim but I like it, which is probably true for most people familiar with the world of Hiroki Nakamura. We were able to have a quick look at a raw piece coming out next spring.

Visvim’s denim is selvedge, but it’s not used in the traditional ways. Slimmer fits require more variation in the leg than a straight selvedge outseam would allow, so he opts for overlocks and wraps the id around the waist instead. The fit itself is the same as you’ve seen on the Fluxus line.

Another detail of note is the patch. Made of an unbleached felt fabric, the patch has been hand-rubbed with indigo to match the denim’s muted tone. With wear, this indigo will fade and lighten as well.

Burgus Plus

Taisuke Nishizawa and Osamu Taniguchi–the core design team at Burgus Plus–have been called “Ueno’s coolest duo”, and we’re inclined to agree. In just a few short seasons, they’ve transformed Hinoya’s house line into a repro-inspired label that can hang with heavies like Post O’Alls or Mister Freedom.

We caught up with them at the opening of their Hickoree’s Japan pop-up collection and they were able to show us a glimpse at a few samples coming for AW 14.

This Western inspired poplin brings together details from a variety of shirts Taisuke studied in late nineteenth-century photographs, like this cuff that slopes slightly inwards at the wrist.

Or the BP brand mark woven into the selvedge line on the interior placket of a check shirt.

Or really everything about this blanket-lined denim engineer’s jacket. All those buttons are Indian head nickels. Hats off to Hickoree’s for bringing their work outside of Japan, I see good things in their future.