Blackmeans

Blackmeans was founded in 2009 in Tokyo by Japanese designer Yujiro Komatsu as a contemporary luxury menswear brand specifically focused on what Komatsu described as 'a deliberately-Japanese-leather-craft anchored avant-garde menswear vocabulary anchored to traditional Japanese leather-tanning and hand-cut leather construction.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2009 Tokyo-anchored 'Japanese-leather-craft' avant-garde menswear brands. The Blackmeans vocabulary settled around several specific products: hand-cut Japanese-vegetable-tanned-leather jackets (the brand's defining product category since 2009 — the iconic Blackmeans Single-Rider and Double-Rider leather jackets have been the brand's anchoring products), deconstructed leather-and-denim hybrid construction garments, the iconic Blackmeans hand-stitched leather-accessories programme, deliberately-archival workwear-derived leather-construction tailored separates, and a colour palette anchored to natural-vegetable-tanned-leather, oxblood, washed-black leather, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of natural-undyed and traditional-Japanese-leather-aesthetic colour combinations. Production is entirely Japanese at the Tokyo workshop. The brand is independent and held by Komatsu. Blackmeans operates flagship retail in Tokyo (Aoyama — the brand's home flagship) plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Antonioli, LN-CC, the broader European avant-garde-luxury specialty retailers, and a curated set of avant-garde-leather specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the most rigorously committed post-2009 Tokyo-anchored 'Japanese-leather-craft' avant-garde menswear brands.