“He’s undone his top button and loosened his tie.” The imaginary salaryman, the suited Japanese corporate worker of the 1980s who inspired Soshi Otsuki’s LVMH Prize-winning work, has gone on his summer vacation. What happens when a conventional man’s office attire starts to break down when he allows himself to relax, just a bit?
You didn’t need to know the specifics of Otsuki’s quietly, affectionately funny social observations of his father’s generation to appreciate that an exceptionally good show was taking place before us. On a sultry Paris evening, pale, lightweight, breezy but un-schlumpy tailoring in many permutations were walking by. Trousers were voluminous and softly pleated; jackets tailored with a whimsical curl in the lapel. Shorts looked as if they’d originated as trousers, perhaps as if chopped off or rolled up for a dad-paddle in the sea.
“It comes from an admiration of travel I never experienced,” Otsuki explained. “When I was young I never had a chance to go abroad and travel in European style. The collection’s like a nostalgia for a memory I don’t have.” Thinking himself into this notion of a strict office-bound father’s adventures in a resort somewhere in Italy led the designer to “an intentionally undone mood.”
So the sense of relaxation progressed, with boxer shorts peeping beneath tailored ones, belts unbuckled, and top buttons undone, “like he does after he’s had a good lunch.” Work never being very far from his mind though, his leather iPad holder remains tucked into his waistband at all times.
One key difference with Otsuki’s thoughtful design narrative is how it goes beyond styling and fuses with the product itself to become something new. Checked shirts had the trompe l’oeil patterned tie—a sliver of fabric which is actually sewn into where the shirt buttons—which impressed jurors at the LVMH Prize. Hidden jetted pockets beneath jacket lapels allow phones to be carried easily. The curled-up apparently un-pressed lapels and shirt collars are actually held rigidly in place by metallic accessories.
Such ingenious inventions, thought through for convenience of use, are very much the result of Japanese design discipline. So are the palpably amazing fabrics, micro-woven to mix colors in the weave which results in traditional-looking menswear tailoring material, but is so light to wear, it’s almost sheer. “I really concentrate on the cutting. To me, soft tailoring is the core of the collection, but it’s not only made by its soft fabric, but by the cutting, by its construction.”
Otsuki says that collaborations with high-level Japanese mills have become much easier since he’s had such acclaim with his shows, and won the LVMH Prize in 2025. “For example, to make a beige, it’s white brown and gray threads woven together which make this faded feel, and not like one plain beige. It gives depth to the texture. Makes it really interesting as a product and garment.”
Underpinning Otsuki’s nostalgia trip is another collaboration, co-branded with the trench coat manufacturer Sanyo. “It’s the one my father used to wear in the 1980s. With huge shoulders.” Since the publicity and the cash from the LVMH Prize, he says his brand is selling really well, distribution’s expanded and—at last—after 10 years perfecting what he does, he has a studio and a team. He nods, smiling, “I’m really having fun.”
