This Japanese Workwear is for Actual Furniture Designers

This Japanese Workwear is for Actual Furniture Designers

Style

Workwear is having a tough time of it. It feels like more double-knee pants and structured canvas jackets are floating around a matcha cafe than an actual job site. The market is oversaturated, which means standing out with a workwear collection is harder than meeting someone who knows their way around a power saw.

It takes a truly novel concept. Something like, say, workwear designed for actual tradespeople? We’d say “imagine that,” but you don’t actually have to.

The prolific Japanese designer Jun Takahashi already did. His UNDERCOVER label just released a new collection created in partnership with Studio Valentin Loellmann, an art-furniture studio in Maastricht, Netherlands, founded in 2010 by German designer Valentin Loellmann.

The idea of making rugged outerwear, pants, heavyweight sweats, and other pieces literally tailor-made to withstand manual labor shouldn’t feel novel, yet we live in a world where it’s okay to release running shorts with a double-knee pant silhouette and fake trompe-l'œil paint spatters. Fashion may have lost the plot, but Takahashi and Loellmann’s collaborative release is blowing us back on ...