I’ve found the recent growth of popularity in Japanese brand A Presse quite interesting. Because while there are lots of things I like and admire about the brand, it feels like it’s often misrepresented.
A Presse is sometimes described as heritage menswear. People see the denim jackets, chinos and other pieces created by the founder Kazuma Shigematsu and describe it as a modern take on the familiar idea of a Japanese designer doing Americana.
But A Presse is more a fashion brand than a heritage one – something that’s clearest in the silhouettes.
Yes, Shigematsu is a vintage collector and inspired by a lot of the same pieces as someone like Kinji Teramoto of 35summers or Kentaro Nakagomi of Coherence. And yes, he is obsessed with production details and creates some beautiful, organic and aged fabrics.
But the fits push the brand much more towards fashion, and are the reason most of the clothes don’t work for me.
I’ve tried A Presse clothes a few times in recent years. I’m always interested in menswear brands producing at a high level of quality and would do the same with The Row, Lemaire or Visvim for example. It’s stimulating; it broadens your perspective.
But while I often love aspects of the A Presse clothes – and price wouldn’t be a problem if something felt special – the silhouettes are too exaggerated.
On the most recent visit, I tried several pieces in Selfridge’s after seeing them on our friend Chris Moorby at the PS pre-owned sale. I tried an overshirt, a knit, some chinos and a canvas jacket, getting a good range of pieces.
The knit (above) was made from a gorgeous silk material that felt more like a dry wool, with just a hint of unexpected luxury. The dark olive colour was perfect, and the Henley neckline was something I don’t already have, and looked great over a shirt.
But the sleeves puddled over my hands (as you can see on the model above, in a medium) and the body dropped down to cover my bum completely. They don’t carry smalls, and in any case this was clearly the intended fit.
The bomber jacket (above) was the opposite – short to the point of rising easily above my mid- to high-rise jeans, and with blousing in the back that was more than you see on even the biggest old-school Valstarinos.
There’s nothing wrong with this type of look, and I love it on other people, but these are not classic shapes – they are deliberately exaggerated, deliberately far from the norm, and as a result more fashion.
Fits like these are often the reason a brand is described as being a ‘whole look’. As in, you need to buy the whole look for the clothes to work. That isn’t necessarily the case, but it can feel like that because the exaggerated shapes don’t work with the rest of your wardrobe.
There’s a spectrum here, and brands sit at different places on it.
Stoffa (above), for example, is a brand we love and have covered frequently over the years. Agyesh and the team often design clothes with slightly less classic shapes, inventing and playing with them in the same way they do with textiles.
But they’re subtler, and as a result most things work with other parts of my wardrobe. Luke at LEJ plays around with this a little too, but in an even subtler way. And brands like Rubato vary in very small ways – and indeed have become more classic over time, as the knits have got a touch longer, the trousers a bit slimmer.
Now, two other points on exaggerated silhouettes: one, they tend to work on certain shapes of people; and two, they tend to date quicker.
Big, drapey clothes look great on bigger guys – particularly tall and wide. It’s a good look on Chris, and indeed it’s one reason Adret clothes look so good on Adam Rogers (their founder). But they’re not for everyone.
Big looks are also more likely to look dated in, say, 10 or 20 years, than more moderate ones. That’s not a problem if you update your wardrobe that often anyway, but it’s not what most people are after.
Those two points come together when you consider something like the Hedi Slimane skinny tailoring that dominated menswear looks in the early 2000s (below). They were exaggerated and so dated quicker; and big guys struggled to wear them – the opposite of the fashion today.
I really love A Presse – its fabrics, even tiny things like its tiny label. It feels refreshing compared to a lot of the fashion we’ve had in the past decade.
People that criticise a brand like A Presse based on something like make quality, are also missing most of the point. Unique fabric development is much harder to do, and often more expensive.
Finally, I should say that the fits do vary at A Presse – some are straighter and more classic than others. But a lot of it falls into this bigger category, and the broader point is also more important: that thinking about clothes from the point of view of silhouette is a useful perspective – one we haven’t talked about enough on PS over the years.
