Kapital

Kapital was founded in 1985 by Toshikiyo Hirata in Kurashiki, Okayama — the Japanese textile city that has produced more denim than anywhere on earth. Hirata had spent the 1970s working in American jeans factories; he came back to Okayama determined to make denim that re-introduced the hand of the craftsperson into a fabric that had become industrial. The label opened as a small workshop producing selvedge denim out of Kojima. The brand's defining moment came when Hirata's son Kiro joined as designer in 2002 and began layering psychedelic, hippie, and Boro-patchwork sensibilities onto the workwear foundation. The result is a vocabulary that nobody else owns: indigo-dyed bandana prints, Sashiko-stitched chore coats, hand-fringed dungarees, beaded knits, paint-splattered Levi's-clone jeans, and a marketing aesthetic (the Kapital lookbooks, photographed often by Eric Kvatek) that reads like a counterculture art project. Kapital remains family-run, vertically integrated in Okayama, and unavailable through most channels. The five Kapital and Kapital Country stores in Tokyo (Ebisu, Aoyama, Ebisu Country, Daikanyama, Kobudo) are nearly the only physical retail. Cult is the right word. So is genius. There is no other brand quite like it.