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. Everything has been produced since day one in a single Garment District atelier in Manhattan. The product canon is dense: the Bedford Jacket (now in its third decade), the Andover Jacket, fatigue pants, the Cagoule, the Fisherman Sweater, plus an endless rotation of patchwork bags, scarves, and headwear that frequently appear in only one or two fabric variants per season. Each piece can come in eight to fifteen different fabric/colour-way combinations across one collection. The brand has a sister label, Needles (founded 1988 by Keizo Shimizu in the same Nepenthes group), and runs flagship retail at Nepenthes New York (Garment District) and Nepenthes Tokyo. Suzuki's parallel role as a New Balance USA design consultant produced the Made in USA M992 reissue and several other reissues of seminal models. Few American brands have built such a coherent body of work while remaining this small.