“A lot of my inspiration comes from the beauty in ordinary things,” says Ssstein designer Kiichiro Asakawa
- Who is it? Ssstein is the ready-to-wear label from Japanese designer Kiichiro Asakawa
- Why do I want it? Warm, unisex tailoring that honours movement, memory, and the poetry of the everyday
- Where can I find it? Ssstein is available via the brand’s website and through select international stockists
Who is it? For Japanese designer Kiichiro Asakawa, observance – the everyday register of presence – is the craft that carries his label Ssstein. “A lot of my inspiration comes from the beauty in ordinary things,” he says of his references: parents collecting their children from school, the view from the train he takes daily, or a couple sharing dinner. Yet simple isn’t sedate. Models moved through his Autumn/Winter 2026 show, his first on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, as if passing through the rhythms of day-to-day life, the garments holding “the imagined emotions of people”. It was “a simple joy and a warm feeling laced with nostalgia,” present, without insistence.
The designer was raised in a family environment where ways of seeing – through literature, music and photography – were given equal emphasis to what was being seen. His way into fashion, however, was largely self-authored: guided by curiosity, Asakawa unpicked vintage garments to study how pattern, textile, and construction guided a body in motion. A year after opening his own store, Carol in Tokyo, where he offered custom-altered vintage denim, the designer launched Ssstein as a move from singular garments towards a wider language of how clothes come to belong to the people who wear them.
Just as he observes the people around him, Asakawa’s recent presentation at Paris’ Conservatoire des arts et métiers returned to the idea that the everyday is never passive, but a responsive relationship between stillness and motion, restraint and release. “It was also about the warmth that I see in the connections and communication I have with the people around me,” he reflects. In this way, Ssstein is a mirror of how Asakawa observes life: attentive and relational. The care extended to the garments is inseparable from the care extended to living as it is – unremarkable, repetitive, shared – revealing the depth and beauty in what is so often passed by.
Why do I want it? Coming to fashion via garments already shaped by wear rather than textbook instruction, Asakawa works with a natural hand for cut and draping – his unisex clothing responsive to the body and the life lived within, and never prescriptive. Oversized coats and jackets are balanced at the shoulder; trousers fall cleanly, amply down the leg; streamlined shirting and slouched knitted layers find an easy coexistence. Any technical work is present without performance: redirected seams, offset closures, and internal structuring is at the ease of wearability, receding once the garment is worn. Each decision is oriented toward longevity – how a garment adapts through use, registers movement, and then retains its integrity across repeated wear.
Perhaps more than any other element of his design, colour and texture are drawn from the small negotiations of everyday life. “My palette is inspired by the little moments in my day,” Asakawa explains. “The yellow of daylight and then the yellow of moonlight, or the changing greens I notice in the trees across the year.” Pops of colour – muted reds, washed lime greens – sit against the kneaded browns of corduroy, wool, and tweed, conveying the same sense of warmth he finds in human connection. “Sometimes I go to a restaurant,” he adds, “and I’ll notice an elderly couple nearby, the warmth between them – and then I’ll remember the colours they were wearing.”
Much like life itself, Ssstein doesn’t operate in the context of newness: proportions, materials, and colours are nurtured in steady relation; pieces from different collections layer easily together to encourage garments to be worn and lived with over time. Continuity, for Asakawa, is the patient accumulation of memory, of feeling, of time. “My number one dream,” he says, “is for this warmth to be felt globally, beyond Japan, beyond Paris.”
Where can I find it? Ssstein is available via the brand’s website and through select international stockists.
