Doublet

Doublet was founded in 2012 in Tokyo by Masayuki Ino, who had previously been a designer at the Japanese street-luxury brand Mihara Yasuhiro. The brand's foundational thesis was specific and visually surreal: produce a menswear vocabulary built on humorous, deliberately childish, surreal-graphic concepts (a 'chaos-embroidered' suit jacket, t-shirts with embroidered fried-rice-and-eggs motifs, the iconic squashed-coke-can hardware) that read as serious craft work despite the absurd thematic vocabulary. The Doublet vocabulary settled around several signatures: hand-embroidered animal and food motifs on tailoring, deliberately-distressed graphic tees, sculptural sneaker collaborations (the Doublet × Nike Killshot 2, the Doublet × Pilot G2 pen-shaped jewelry), and a colour palette anchored to washed-pastels, primary brights, and the brand's recurring use of yellow. Doublet became the first Japanese designer to win the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2018, an inflection point that brought the brand into the broader Paris fashion conversation. Doublet is independent and held by Ino. The brand presents on the Paris Men's calendar each season and distributes through SSENSE, GR8, Dover Street Market, MATCHES, Lane Crawford, the major Japanese department stores, and a small Tokyo flagship at the Shibuya Parco. Few Japanese designers of the 2010s generation have built such a culturally specific surreal-craft vocabulary while becoming a Paris-fashion-week regular.