Setchu

Setchu was founded in 2020 in Milan by Japanese designer Satoshi Kuwata, a former Saint Laurent and Givenchy menswear designer who launched the brand specifically focused on what Kuwata described as 'a deliberately Japanese-Western-folded vocabulary' — the brand name 'Setchu' (折衷) is a Japanese term meaning 'compromise' or 'fold,' referring to the brand's central design proposition of taking Japanese garment-folding-and-construction traditions and 'folding them together' with Western tailoring proportions. The Setchu vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: the brand's iconic 'Origami' tailored jacket (a single-pattern jacket that can be folded into a flat triangle and reconstructed into different silhouettes — the defining product), kimono-derived deconstructed shirting with hand-finished detail, hand-knitted Japanese-cotton sweaters, deconstructed cotton-and-wool tailoring with deliberately Japanese-fold construction, and a colour palette anchored to washed-cream, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, washed-navy, and the brand's recurring use of natural-indigo and traditional-Japanese-dye tones. The brand won the LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize in 2023 — the first Japanese designer to win the prize. The brand is independent and held by Kuwata. Setchu operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Antonioli, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, the Beams Plus network in Tokyo, and a curated set of luxury menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the most conceptually rigorous post-2020 Milan-anchored Japanese-menswear debuts, with the deliberately-Japanese-Western-fold positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'cross-cultural-tailoring' conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2018.