Japan is much bigger than it seems. On a map, the 1,900-mile-long volcanic archipelago appears to be a berg in the sea, broken off from the Eurasian landmass. You might not realize just how large the country is—about the length of the entire east coast of the United States—until you find yourself traveling by plane, train, and taxi across the vast industrialized midsection of the main island, making your way west from Tokyo to a small district in the Okayama Prefecture known as Kojima, in search of denim paradise.
In Tokyo they refer to this part of Japan as the countryside, but that's more of a colloquialism than an accurate description of the landscape. It's mostly industrial, flat, punctuated by small shopping centers with dollar stores and casual udon restaurants. To be honest, I was expecting something a little more majestic, considering that this is sacred ground to some. Kojima is known as the denim capital of Japan and is home to some of the most advanced denim makers on the planet. Here jeans are more than a sturdy pair of pants. Just as with any craft, like pottery or basket weaving, they can be as functional or as artful as the maker wants them to be. And among these rarefied manufacturers, perhaps none is more renowned or celebrated than Kapital, whose roots can be traced back to the 1980s and Toshikiyo Hirata. Today, under the creative direction of Toshikiyo's son, Kiro Hirata, Kapital has become a highly coveted, globally influential fashion brand that elevates denim to its greatest heights.
I traveled just under 7,000 miles from New York City to meet Kiro at the company headquarters, which are located inside a brutalist compound of dusty red stucco buildings that once contained Kojima's public library and culture center. The Hiratas purchased the property in 2013, and it now houses Kapital's offices and some factory space, as well as a sprawling boutique, a rare-book store, and a bandanna museum, which consists mostly of Kiro's personal collection. Kapital has two additional stores in the neighborhood—one situated in a traditional Japanese home with a beautifully sculpted rock garden, and another in a rustic cabin the family built by hand using found and reclaimed materials.
When I meet him, Kiro, 47, is wearing a white button-down shirt with the tails tied at his waist and snakeskin boots (samples). He's a busy guy, dividing his time between Tokyo, where he lives full-time, Kojima, and wherever on earth his work takes him, constantly hunting for vintage clothing and crafts along the way. Finding an hour to hang with him was complicated. In fact, it took well over a year.
We're joined by Kana Rosos, Kiro's sister, who brokered the meeting. She handles communications and international sales for the company. Their parents are at work today, too. Mr. Hirata is cutting patterns from bolts of fabric for the spring 2020 collection samples, while Mrs. Hirata is at the “finish and fold” table, completing the final step in the production process before garments are sent down to be hung on the racks at one of the three stores they have here in Kojima (or shipped off to one of the 60 or so retailers Kapital has worldwide, including 15 stores in Japan plus a web shop).
Kiro speaks English well, having spent a few years in the U.S. studying art immediately after high school, but he isn't much of a talker. He just doesn't seem interested in articulating why he does what he does or how he does it. I can't tell if he's dodging questions intentionally as a way to maintain the enigmatic quality of Kapital, or if I'm just asking all the wrong questions. Even without saying much, he exudes charisma and wisdom. He smiles widely, leaning toward me with his elbows on his knees, nodding enthusiastically and staring intently into my eyes when I talk. But he says very little in response.
I ask him about the smiley faces, which appear on everything in the Kapital line, from jeans and hoodies to socks and coffee mugs.
“Hippie culture,” he says. “So awesome.”
I ask him how it feels to see his family's denim business go global, with high-profile fans like A$AP Rocky and John Mayer spending stacks of cash in his stores.
“My feeling is, I've been doing the same thing 25 years.”
I ask him about the intense development process that goes into creating some of the dyeing methods he uses, often requiring 100 or so test runs before arriving at the right formula.
“One hundred is not enough.”
And I prod him on the incredible size of the collections, nearly 400 pieces in a given season, plus random monthly releases from the Kapital Kountry collection.
“You think it's a lot,” he says. “But I don't.”
We go back and forth like this for about 20 minutes, so I suggest that we take a break to shoot some photos. But he insists that we continue.
I'm stumped. What would he like me to ask him?
“I have a request,” he says.
Okay.
“Can you give me a nickname?”
Kiro's father, Mr. Hirata, is the family's original denim-head. While on a trip to the U.S. as a karate instructor in the 1980s, he was introduced to American jeans and vintage clothing. So when he returned to Kojima, his wife's hometown, he opened a denim factory—Capital Ltd.—and later a vintage store. Eventually that became the launch point for Kapital. As a kid growing up in Okayama, Kiro didn't see himself joining the family business. He wanted out. So at 19 he went to the U.S. to paint and study art. But there, as his father did, he found a passion for vintage clothing and denim.
When he arrived back in Japan, he went to work for 45R, another high-end Japanese denim brand but with a slightly more refined, traditional approach. In 2002, Kiro left 45R to finally go work for his father, and that's when, deliberately or not, they arrived at the magic formula, applying his art-minded design sensibility to his father's reverence for traditional craftsmanship. That was when Kapital emerged.
Japan is renowned for denim, but mostly historically accurate replicas of old American jeans, made by weaving, dyeing, and stitching denim exactly as brands like Levi's and Lee have done since the 19th century. Kapital takes an avant-garde approach to that tradition, adding new layers to complicate it. One example of this is Kiro's invention of heavy-duty tweed-like Century Denim, which is dyed using persimmon juice and gives jeans a sculptural quality, making them stiff enough to stand up on their own. “Looking back at the history of jeans, the oldest jeans from Levi's are about 100 years old,” Kiro has said. “Jeans originated in the USA, and my father perfectly mastered the reproduction. So I thought it was my turn to create something new and not just repeat what has already been done. I wanted to create something for the next 100 years into the future.”
Kiro is singularly obsessed with history, with making something resistant to time. And he thinks that since I'm a writer, I should be able to give him a nickname, a way for the world to understand and remember him with just a couple of words.
I offer the first thing that comes to mind. How about Smiley? Seems to fit the man and the brand. But he doesn't like it; too goofy. Plus he doesn't want Kapital to be known as the smiley-face brand. The brand's motifs also include peace signs, pot leaves, and roses, but never in quite the way you expect them. A Kapital collection plays like a greatest-hits compilation of hippie-dippie Americana, distorted, asymmetric, and exaggerated, as if dosed with Timothy Leary's finest psychedelics. All of the classic archetypes of the era are there: the war vet, the biker, the reggae singer, the rock star, the preppy, the athlete, the surfer… They're all on the same drugs, and they all somehow landed in Japan, where their clothes were bathed in vats of indigo, shibori dyed, intricately embroidered and reconstructed, boro-style, into wild East-meets-West mash-ups.
Kana describes this “culture clash” as being quintessential to Kapital, explaining how the source material for many of the pieces in the collection come from America but they are made using Japanese techniques and fabrics for a more interesting result. Styles are mixed and matched: A bomber jacket becomes a kimono; sweatpants are dyed and patched like ancient textiles. In some cases, as with tie-dyeing, which is considered to be a typical vintage hippie craft, and Japanese shibori dyeing, which dates back as far as the eighth century, the connection is even more direct.
Then there are the Kapital pieces that seem to have no original source material other than Kiro's own unique imagination. I encountered one such piece at the Kapital store in Kyoto, a wool intarsia sweater with an orange body, black stripes, and a white “belly” on the torso under the arms. The coolest version I've seen—and a totally bizarre example—of the recent craze for animal prints in menswear. And that's when a nickname hit me.…
The Tiger! Kiro the Tiger.
He rolls his eyes.
What? That's a great nickname.
He gives Kana a look and she deciphers. It has to relate to what he does, to Kapital.
“Air Jordan!” Kiro says enthusiastically. He wants a slogan. Something that will immediately call his particular skills to mind.
I told him that nicknames are hard. They take time. They come naturally and can't be forced. I promised him that I'd think about it and if I came up with something that felt right, I'd print it in this article. And in exchange, if he felt it suited him, he promised that he'd print it on a shirt.
One of the Kapital stores in Kojima, located in a traditional Japanese home set up for a tea ceremony, is known as Blue Hands, which functions as a recurring slogan that refers to the process of dyeing denim by hand in indigo. Denim is unique in the way it takes on the characteristics of the wearer and the wearer takes on the characteristics of the fabric. The dye rubs off onto your skin, turning it blue, while the color of the fabric fades with time, memorizing the shape of your body in striations of blue. Through Kapital, Kiro has made this cycle into a universal experience, presenting denim in different cultural contexts, from West Texas to West Africa, Kingston to Perth, charging it with transcendent quality.
“Denim,” Kiro tells me. “That is my philosophy.”
Devotees frequently travel across Japan for the total experience. (Visit enough Kapital stores, collect a special token with a purchase at each one, and you can return them to Kapital in exchange for a rare gift.) Each store has a different personality. In some you have to remove your shoes before entering. Others are piled high with unusual pieces from the Kapital archive, cramped the way an American vintage store might be. Obsessives hunt for the bandannas, which come in a huge range of classic two-tone prints as well as trippy, colorful ones. Many of the most highly coveted signature pieces—like the complicated Kamakura Mountain Parka, which can be worn in multiple ways, and the carefully destroyed The Old Man and the Sea caps—sell out quickly and fetch steep markups on the secondary market. The silk-and-rayon printed camp shirts have become summer essentials for the initiated. And the wildly oversize work shirts—imagine if you just kept adding Xs to an XL—are paragons for menswear's current proportionally adventurous era.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the discovery and immersive experience you get from Kapital, whether it's by digging through the racks in one of the shops or unboxing a piece you ordered online while on your couch, are spiritually tinged. The traditions of ancient Japan, of postwar America, of the Hirata family's unique experience—it's all there. And meeting Kiro brings everything into sharp relief.
So here it is. Like any good nickname, it's not something I had to make up after all. It's a characteristic he's taken on himself, just by wearing his own clothes. Kiro Hirata, Mr. Blue.
Noah Johnson is style editor at GQ.
A version of this story appears in the Fall 2019 issue of GQ Style with the title “Kapitalism.”
