Twice a year, our sourcing team flies to Tokyo. We spend five days in the vintage district of Shimokitazawa — a neighbourhood that operates on its own logic, where a 1999 Fila windbreaker sits next to a 1978 Levi’s jacket sits next to a deadstock Miss Sixty mini from 2002, all in the same building, sometimes on the same rail.
The Building
There’s a warehouse in Shimokitazawa that doesn’t have a sign. You know it by the queue that forms outside on Saturday mornings — serious buyers, not tourists, standing in a specific kind of patient silence that suggests they’ve done this before. The building has six floors. Each floor has a different curatorial logic. We always start at the top, where the newest acquisitions are, and work downward.
What We’re Looking For
Japanese vintage buyers have an approach to preservation that produces garments in conditions you rarely find elsewhere. A piece that would be rated 7/10 in a UK charity shop is frequently rated 9/10 in Tokyo because the original owner stored it correctly — clean, folded, away from light. This matters enormously for Y2K pieces, where the metallic threads and synthetic fibres are particularly sensitive to light damage.
We’re specifically looking for: pieces with original tags, garments in unusual colourways that weren’t widely distributed in the UK, and items from brands that operated primarily in Japan and South Korea during the Y2K era, some of which we can’t source anywhere else.
The Economics
Tokyo sourcing is expensive. The flights, the storage, the shipping — it adds cost to every piece that comes out of it. But the quality differential is significant enough that we consider it essential. The pieces that come from these trips are consistently the strongest we stock. When you’re buying from our Archive category, you’re often buying something that came from that building.