Beams Plus

BEAMS Plus launched in 1999 as the in-house brand of BEAMS dedicated to American Ivy League and trad-classic menswear, designed by long-time BEAMS buyer Takeya Nakamura. The brand's mission was to produce, rather than just import, the canonical American trad wardrobe — button-down oxfords with the proper Brooks Brothers collar roll, sack-cut blazers, repp tie patterns drawn from the Ivy League archive, plus the kind of MA-1 jackets and chinos that Japanese collectors had long preferred to source vintage. The vocabulary draws explicitly from the TAKE IVY photography book (1965, see also: MKI MIYUKI ZOKU), from J. Press and Brooks Brothers archives, and from the Miyuki-zoku subculture. BEAMS Plus also produces excellent reinterpretations of US military patterns (woodland camo, OG-107 fatigues), workwear (the Workshop carpenter pant), and high-quality knitwear that pulls from American 1950s-60s collegiate sources. Hand-tailored MTM blazers are offered alongside the seasonal collection. BEAMS Plus operates standalone stores within the BEAMS retail network in Tokyo (Harajuku, Shinjuku, Shibuya, the Marunouchi BEAMS Plus flagship), Kyoto, Osaka, plus exports to international retailers (BEAMS Plus pieces are stocked at Drake's, Anthology, Mr Porter, and similar trad-oriented houses globally). Nakamura remains the design director. Few brands have so completely transformed American trad-classic clothing into a Japanese craft project.