Uniqlo’s lack of flamboyance chimed with the times. As austerity bit in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, ostentation was shown the door. “It was suddenly so uncool to look rich,” Christina Binkley, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told Vox in 2018. The rhinestone-encrusted 2000s in all their blinged-out glory were done: the past ten years have seen an impulse towards simplicity. Uniqlo’s low prices and cerebral patina proved popular with young, urban professionals, and gained the backing of voices that mattered. In 2010 New York magazine wrote that “seemingly out of nowhere, Uniqlo’s cheap, skinny, rainbow-coloured basics became a kind of New York uniform”. Last year the Atlantic postulated that “Uniqlo is Gap for Millennials”.

Every clothing brand tries to create classics. Few actively avoid the latest fashion. This is precisely Uniqlo’s promise. Katsuta and his team try to work out which trends won’t resonate on a global scale and pounce on ones that do. He claims that he knew from the minute he saw skinny jeans on the streets of Los Angeles that they were versatile enough to become what Uniqlo calls “essential”. “I still remember when I started talking about skinny jeans in our Tokyo office,” he told me. “People say, ‘Yuki, that’s going to be great for tall skinny American ladies but our nation is completely different, we are small and wide.’ But it turned out in Japan that skinny jeans were like the new tights, and a lot of ladies wear a longer sweater or a tunic with them.” He added in a generous amount of stretch and they became even more “useful”, as a favoured Uniqlo expression has it. “Now you can wear them not only outside but also inside the house,” he said. “They’re comfortable, but with the spice of fashion.”

When you ask Uniqlo executives to explain the appeal of their brand, they invariably circle back to their own portmanteau coinage, “Lifewear”, a concept that proves rather slippery to define. Katsuta describes it as “quality clothing at affordable prices to make everyday life better and more comfortable”. Aldo Liguori, the Italian-born head of publicity at Uniqlo, told me that it means, “I cannot tell you what you need. Only you know what you need and how we can fit with your daily life.” Yanai insisted to me that Lifewear was not just a “slogan” but “means quintessential, everyday life”.

“Everyday” is a buzzword that recurs with frequency when you talk to Uniqlo execs. John Jay, president of global creative at Fast Retailing, said that the company was motivated by “respect for everyday people”. It struck me as a strange value for a fashion company to tout, given that people so often express their individuality through their choice of clothes. But then, Uniqlo’s neutral, even bland basics, convey the kind of low-key self-assurance that’s always in style, perhaps because it hints at wealth. (A headline from the Cut last year confirms as much: “How to look rich wearing only Uniqlo”.)

Uniqlo produces a relatively limited number of lines – Retviews, a firm that a***yses retail sales, found in October 2019 that the Japanese firm offered fewer than 2,000 distinct items in its European stores over the course of a year, compared with more than 6,000 by Zara and 17,000 by h&m. But many of these are multiplied through a rainbow of colours. Katsuta argues that this lets customers find their own style through combining items. “Our clothes shouldn’t have individual attitude. People should create their own by mixing and matching,” he said.

Similarly, the interior design of Uniqlo stores around the world is deliberately spare, creating a blank canvas for shoppers. “It’s a white box, always on a white background. It’s not a lifestyle brand,” said Markus Kiersztan, who helped design the flagship store in New York in 2010. Unlike competitors that often feature aspirational pictures of models in perfectly fitting garb, Uniqlo stores use rotating putty-coloured mannequins (“a neutral colour that is not white”, a pr officer tells me). These are generally dressed in three or four layers, a styling trademark introduced by Jay, the company’s president, who sees layering as the simplest way to create your own look. Jay was also responsible for scrunching the sleeves up, now another Uniqlo trademark. Yuniya Kawamura, a professor of sociology at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, told me that it reminded her of the 12-layer kimonos that court ladies wore during the Heian period in the 9th to 12th centuries: “They sometimes wore even more layers, and the different arrangements and combinations of colours showed a wearer’s unique taste and style.” Underneath the layers of clothes are layers of history.

For all its desire to take on the world, Uniqlo is keen to stress its Japanese heritage. Yanai took pride in pointing out to me that the denim in the men’s selvedge classic-fit jeans is spun, dyed and woven in Hiroshima by a manufacturer that uses traditional techniques. (He did not mention, however, that the jeans were designed in Uniqlo’s office in Los Angeles and that a factory in Bangladesh sews and finishes them.) “We are from Japan”, reads the company’s promotional brochure that was handed to me when I visited its headquarters, “and this naturally affects how we make the clothes we make.” The fundamental Japanese design principles Uniqlo invokes are “deep thoughtfulness”, “practical beauty”, and “simple made better”.

At first glance there seems nothing obviously Japanese about Uniqlo’s wares. But a strong strain of minimalism pervades Japanese culture. Buddhism remains an important influence on Japanese society even in an increasingly secular age, and among its core tenets are renunciation and detachment – concepts that mean being able to suppress one’s lust for the material elements of daily life. Mario Praz, an Italian critic, contrasts the Japanese style with the suffocating abundance of Victorian interiors in Europe and America which, he says, stemmed from horror vacui (fear of emptiness). More recently, young people in the West have also grown less enamoured with acquiring stuff, hence the widespread popularity of another Japanese export: Marie Kondo, a professional declutterer.

Uniqlo’s plainness and restraint appeals to consumers across the globe. These design principles also help the company negotiate the tension between the low cost of its garments and the perception of good quality. Kawamura recalls an old Japanese proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” She adds: “In a society that traditionally values conformity and harmony, dressing like everyone else is seen as socially desirable.” When everyone is wearing a solid-black sweater, she said, “no one knows whether that is Uniqlo or Yohji Yamamoto (a Japanese avant-garde designer).”

As a guide for its manufacturing process, Uniqlo invokes kaizen, the idea of continuously improving, which is another popular principle within Japanese management circles. Materials are constantly being refined, becoming ever lighter and less obtrusive. In 2011, HeatTech, one of Uniqlo’s flagship fabrics, contained 88 threads; in the following incarnation it was somehow warmer with only 64. “When people need to make clothes to stay warm, they are inclined to go thicker,” Katsuta has said. “We have done the opposite.” Where many other apparel-makers aim to make a splash, it sometimes seems as though Uniqlo’s ultimate goal is to refine its clothes into invisibility.

Whether this Japanese company can dominate global fashion remains an open question. Impressive though it has been, Uniqlo’s growth over the past decade has not met Yanai’s own ambitious targets. In 2012 he said he wanted Fast Retailing to hit $50bn in revenue by 2020 (at the time its revenues were $10bn a year); it reached $17bn in 2019. As for its worldwide appeal, the main source of Uniqlo’s growth these days comes not from Western markets but the middle classes of China and South-East Asia. Uniqlo has now overtaken its two closest rivals, h&m and Zara, in China; in 2018, a third of the company’s overall profits came from its 700 Chinese outlets.

The American market has proved harder to crack. The 56 Uniqlo stores in America fall far short of Yanai’s plan, in 2012, to open 200 there. They still operate at a loss. “When you think about the American market, you don’t always think of subtlety,” said Steve Rowen of Retail Systems Research, a consultancy. “This is a social-climber society. Even if you want to fly under the radar, there still has to be some indication that you’re fashion forward.” Once that urban millennial with a starter job begins to make real money, Rowen postulated, “they move past a brand like Uniqlo pretty quickly.” Americans are perhaps willing to embrace invisibility only until they are rich enough to want to be seen.

These days clothing companies have to worry about far more than merely whether people like their wares. As with the rest of the garment industry, Uniqlo faces a backlash about the hidden social and environmental cost of its products. The fashion industry accounts for some 8% of greenhouse-gas emissions, making it the world’s most polluting industry after oil, according to a report by Quantis, a consultancy, in 2018. The human toll of some clothing supply chains has come under increased scrutiny, particularly since a building that housed several garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013 (Uniqlo had moved some of its manufacturing from China to Bangladesh, where wages are lower, but was not implicated in this incident).

The expression “fast fashion” has become a watchword for low-cost, on-trend items made on mass-production lines that are soon abandoned by the wearer. The phrase is banned at Uniqlo’s headquarters – the company is not overtly dedicated to fast fashion the way that many other retailers are, and it has no interest in knocking out quick-fire responses to Instagram fads at bargain-basement prices. But as a retailer that sells more than 1bn items each year – and at low prices – Uniqlo falls foul of many of the same accusations and negative publicity directed at firms that are more obviously trend-driven.

Like other clothing companies, Uniqlo has gestured towards sustainability. Since 2006 it has invited customers to recycle old clothes in-store (the recycling boxes I examined in Japan were empty). Toray, Uniqlo’s manufacturing partner, has found a way to make polo shirts out of old water bottles: for this year’s spring/summer season, 48m 500ml bottles were used to make an undisclosed number of polo shirts. In September 2019 the company announced a plan to reuse the stuffing from its Ultra Light Down products, but down itself has become a controversial product as awareness grows of the conditions in which the feather industry keeps some ducks. Uniqlo says its down suppliers are forbidden from using methods such as plucking feathers from live birds, and that its down and feathers are ethically sourced. Recently it signed up to the Responsible Down Standard, a scheme that a number of retailers are already party to.

The company has also been criticised for alleged human-rights violations in its supply chain, especially in its Chinese factories (Uniqlo operates just two workshops in Japan because wages are so high there). Uniqlo says that it upholds working standards for people across the supply chain.

It was only this year that Uniqlo set targets for reducing its polluting emissions and even these are modest. Fashion Revolution, an ngo that vets corporate supply chains, found in 2019 that Uniqlo was only moderately open about its governance, due diligence and the sources of its materials, and lagged behind Zara and h&m on some fronts.

Yet my own buying habits suggest that Uniqlo can’t simply be dismissed as fast fashion. Last Christmas, not long after I moved back to America from Japan, I visited a shopping mall at Tyson’s Corner, a wealthy neighbourhood outside Washington, dc. h&m gleamed with sequinned tops that no one would wear in January. Gap hawked pastel-coloured puffers, improbably inflated like Michelin men. Both shops were empty.

At Uniqlo, a cramped storefront on a second floor with low ceilings, the window displayed maroon flannel shirts – with the sleeves scrunched up, naturally – and stretchy charcoal trousers. It was all a bit dull. The retail experience seemed very Japanese: the shop was crowded, though not disorganised. The long queue to pay moved swiftly, with an efficiency not often encountered in suburban America. After I made my purchase, my credit card was handed back to me with two hands, as is customary with all interactions involving money in Japan.

For $29 I bought a pair of grey wool HeatTech trousers with an elastic waist: sweatpants masquerading as smart casual. I wore them for months, eventually abandoning them only because the season changed. They are comfy, warm and unobtrusive enough to go with everything. They have pockets, which are useful, and I can throw them in the dryer without worrying that the stretchy fabric will lose its give. I wore them almost every day when stuck inside during the coronavirus lockdown, through interminable Zoom meetings and an entire series of “Breaking Bad”. When the world slowed to a near halt, Uniqlo was there to fill the void.

economist.com/1843/2020/07/06/the-united-nations-of-uniqlo

Nylon active shorts are fire

Great read @proper

Uniqlo the goat

uniqlo.com/us/en/men-u-oversized-crew-neck-short-sleeve-t-shirt-422995.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=bouncex&utm_term=behavioralemail&utm_campaign=bis_1_of_2&ibx_source=bs8hhiir594hqmggh1b0&dwvar_422995_color=COL09&ueh=910aab2a79938ce0038d551eea1100940e35765e45efe3d0ca0232588c1a7991

is it me or did they just add new colors to these

uniqlo u tees are on sale in Canada
uniqlo.com/ca/en/products/E422992-000?colorCode=COL09

New U szn approachin

on sale in us too

are the UNIQLO U CUBAN SHORT SLEEVE SHIRTs worth it?

F*** no lol just get the mainline open collar shirts

normally gets announced august released in september

Should I cop for winter fall

Do you guys still recommend the active nylon shorts? I remember a lot of people liking them on old ktt and wondering if they’re still solid

I have a few pairs, very solid shorts

How tall r u and what size did u cop if u don’t mind me asking. Im tryna figure out where they’ll sit on my leg

Medium and I’m 6 ft

They sit above my knee

Thanks I appreciate it