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Hender Scheme

Hender Scheme was founded in 2010 in Tokyo by Ryo Kashiwazaki as a leather-anchored footwear-and-accessories brand built around an unusual core practice: vegetable-tanned natural leather reproductions of the most-iconic athletic footwear silhouettes (the Nike Air Force 1, the Adidas Stan Smith, the Nike Air Jordan 1, the Reebok Insta Pump Fury) made entirely in Tokyo by Kashiwazaki and his small workshop team. The brand's foundational thesis was specific and conceptually rigorous: take the cultural-iconography of mass-produced athletic footwear and rebuild it in the most archetypal traditional-leather-craft language, as a deliberate act of slow-craft commentary.

Nike

Nike began in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports, a small Oregon importer of Onitsuka Tiger running shoes founded by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and his former runner Phil Knight. The two had a thesis — that purpose-built American athletic footwear could beat the German brands then dominating track — and tested it across a decade of distance running and tinkering. In 1971 they cut ties with Onitsuka, commissioned the Swoosh from design student Carolyn Davidson for $35, and rebranded as Nike, named for the Greek goddess of victory.

Prada

Prada began as Fratelli Prada in 1913, a Milan leather-goods shop founded by brothers Mario and Martino Prada on Via Manzoni. For seven decades it operated as a quiet, traditional Milanese maker of luggage and accessories. The transformation came in 1978 when Miuccia Prada, Mario's granddaughter, took control of the company and partnered with Patrizio Bertelli (whom she later married); together they reshaped Prada into one of the most intellectually rigorous fashion houses of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Beams

BEAMS was founded in 1976 in Harajuku, Tokyo by Etsuzo Shitara as a tiny 16-square-meter store selling American university merchandise and casual clothing — UCLA t-shirts, Champion sweats, Levi's jeans. The thesis, in retrospect, was simple but radical: Japanese consumers had developed an authentic taste for American campus dress, and they deserved a shop curated by people who took the source culture seriously rather than the mass-market 'American style' shops of the era.

Dior

Christian Dior opened his maison on Avenue Montaigne in Paris in December 1946 and presented the first 'New Look' collection on February 12, 1947 — wasp waists, full skirts, sloped shoulders, a deliberate return to lavish femininity after years of wartime austerity. The look reset Parisian couture overnight and Dior himself became, within months, the most-discussed designer in the world. He died of a heart attack in October 1957 at 52, having dressed an entire decade.

Engineered Garments

Engineered Garments was founded in 1999 by Daiki Suzuki, then president of Nepenthes USA. Suzuki had spent the 1980s and 90s as a buyer and importer of American workwear and vintage menswear into Japan, and he founded Engineered Garments to make in New York the kinds of clothes he had spent twenty years studying — small-run, tailored, with American-inflected workwear bones and a Japanese editor's eye.

GANNI

Ganni was founded in 2000 by Frans Truelsen in Copenhagen as a cashmere knitwear brand and bought in 2009 by Truelsen's friends Nicolaj and Ditte Reffstrup — a married couple who had been customers. Ditte became creative director, Nicolaj became CEO, and over the next fifteen years they rebuilt Ganni from a cashmere line into the defining brand of Scandinavian cool-girl style, popularising Copenhagen Fashion Week and bridging Nordic minimalism with playful pattern, party-dress femininity, and a sustainability narrative.

JW Anderson

JW Anderson was founded in 2008 in London by Jonathan Anderson, a Northern Irish designer who had recently graduated from the London College of Fashion. The label launched with menswear and added womenswear in 2010; the early collections were notable for an unabashed gender fluidity in cut and fabric that, in retrospect, helped accelerate the contemporary unisex-fashion conversation by several years.

Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs the designer was born in New York in 1963 and studied at Parsons. His earliest professional moment came in 1989 when, at 26, he was appointed Perry Ellis's first menswear designer; his Spring 1993 'Grunge' collection for Perry Ellis — featuring flannel shirts and combat boots on the runway as a direct quotation of Seattle indie rock — caused enough scandal that Ellis fired him on the spot. The collection is now widely regarded as having permanently shifted American fashion's relationship to subculture.

New Balance

New Balance was founded in 1906 in Boston as the New Balance Arch Support Company — a small workshop making prescription arch supports and orthopedic shoes. It was a quiet medical-footwear business for half a century until Paul Kidd acquired and re-founded it in 1956, and Jim Davis bought it on April 17, 1972 (the day of the Boston Marathon), beginning the transformation into an athletic brand. Davis still owns the company outright today.

Opening Ceremony

New York multi-brand retailer-turned-label founded by Carol Lim and Humberto Leon in 2002, known for cross-cultural collaborations and emerging-designer introductions; the retail business wound down in 2020 but its archive and editorial influence persist.

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