JULIUS

JULIUS was founded in 1996 in Tokyo by Tatsuro Horikawa as an avant-garde menswear-and-womenswear brand built around what Horikawa described as 'a black-anchored architectural fashion vocabulary' — drape-heavy garment construction, deliberate proportional distortion, and an absolute commitment to a single dominant colour: deep, washed, and matte black. The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce a Tokyo avant-garde fashion that read as the heir to Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons 1980s black-period work but rebuilt for the post-2000 streetwear-meets-avant-garde conversation. The JULIUS vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: drape-heavy hooded outerwear with deliberately exaggerated sleeve and hood proportions, dropped-crotch trousers with technical-fabric construction, leather details and hardware accents anchored to a goth-aesthetic-meets-utilitarian vocabulary, deconstructed t-shirts and jersey pieces, and an almost-exclusive colour palette of matte black, washed-charcoal black, and occasional dark-indigo or oxblood accents. The brand presents at the Paris Men's calendar each season. The brand is independent and held by Horikawa. JULIUS operates a flagship in Tokyo (Aoyama, the brand's home store) plus international wholesale through SSENSE, GR8, Atelier New Regime, Antonioli, LN-CC, and a small set of carefully chosen avant-garde-luxury specialty retailers globally — particularly in the Rick Owens, Carol Christian Poell, Boris Bidjan Saberi, Guidi, and Julius constellation of brands that anchor the 'avant-garde black' luxury aesthetic. Few Tokyo brands of the post-1995 generation have remained so disciplined around a single chromatic-and-conceptual proposition.