NEEDLES SWEATPANTS

As the brainchild of Japanese design veteran Keizo Shimizu, clothing label NEEDLES connotes a highly referential yet ultimately singular vision of menswear. Operating as Tokyo’s best-kept-secret before infiltrating New York City via the Shimizu-helmed Nephethens store, the brand freely integrates style cues from both cultures in equal measure. Shimizu’s early-life affinity for Ivy-league deadstock translates into off-kilter collegiate pieces, which are injected with a welcomed sense of unfamiliarity. Given his background at Nephethens, Shimizu approaches design from a retailer’s viewpoint, assembling collections that touch on a variety of styles while maintaining an air of calcultated curation. This stylistic patchwork gives way to multi-textile constructions that defy the rigidity of retrograde American menswear, offering an unexpected warmth to NEEDLES’s cross-cultural collage.