Brand in Focus | Pt. 8: DA'S (JP)
Feel-good experiments from Tokyo
DA’S is the in-house brand of BROWN&SEEDLING, a small appointment-only store in the Chuo neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan which also stocks — among others — KAVAL (JP), TENDER CO. (UK) and EMATYTE (IT). The brand was founded in 2009, about two years before the store was opened, by a duo called Saitoh Gafutari. (“Gafutari” means “two of us” — so “Saitoh Gafutari” means “two Saitoh.”) From the start, DA’S has been available exclusively at BROWN&SEEDLING, whose curation the owners have carefully and deliberately shaped around clothes they do not make themselves.
Now, some fifteen years after the brand’s establishment, DA’S has created almost two hundred unique pieces, all in very limited quantities and some in collaboration with the likes of PATRINIA (JP) and GUIDI (IT). One core feature of DA’S identity is the personal, almost intimate way in which new items are introduced on the store’s blog. Here, details about the sourcing of fabrics and sewing methods are mixed with brief, sometimes serious and at other times slightly humorous, reflections on decisions behind a particular design (“the leather turned out more smooth than expected, so we added some paint”, “we thought: why not try to use flat seams for saddle shoulder sleeves?”). In some cases, the makers admit that something they had in mind simply didn’t work out, offering the failed samples at cost price.
Looking at DA’S products from the past few years, it’s possible to recognize this free spirit of trial-and-error experimentation. There are as many different fabrics (Subin cotton, linen-denim, dead stock French linen, Ezo deer leather, Schoeller 3XDRY) as there are applied techniques (pigment prints, hand-paint splatters, mud indigo dyes, hand-knitting). Together, these have made possible a host of remarkable finished products, from woollen sweatshirts, knitted and woven tees and tweed climbing pants to technical anoraks, linen pyjamas, free size trousers and alpaca blousons. It’s not always easy to follow, but DA’S clothing line-up is sometimes presented as a fictional story starring several characters (‘Travis’, ‘Lucas’, ‘Klaus’, ‘Tana’, ‘Balboa’) — with the makers introducing new items as inspired by the daily needs or desires of these figures. One of DA’S staples is the H93 pants, which they return to almost every year to reimagine it in a different fabric (wool, linen-denim, cotton-silk, tweed, etc.).
