What can Soshi Otsuki do for Menswear?

Welcome back to Wimpy! I am finally back in Tokyo after way too long in Europe, armed with an arsenal of unique profiles from opinionated designers spanning Paris to New Delhi to Tokyo, and some silly-but-serious menswear analysis.

Below, a full review of Soshiotsuki’s Spring Summer 2027 collection, which also marked the designer’s debut at Paris Fashion Week. I’ve been covering Otsuki’s work for the best part of four years, and it was oddly emotional seeing him surrounded by the press in Paris this season. But was it any good? And can Otsuki’s brand of nostalgia really move the needle? Let’s get into it.

Soshi Otsuki has landed in Paris.

The Tokyo-based designer won last year’s LVMH Prize, his salaryman lookbooks have been consistently viral on Instagram for the past few seasons, and his show at Pitti Uomo in January was a roaring success. Could he keep up momentum on fashion’s biggest platform? I’ll get into the full review below, but first I want to pick up on where Otsuki currently sits in the pantheon of Japanese designers, and what it means for menswear at large.

As a new Japanese addition to the schedule, Otsuki is not alone. Auralee and Ssstein are the other buzzy new(ish) kids on the block and though they are true to how menswear guys currently want to dress, both are fundamentally product-focused labels more adept in making immaculate jackets and trousers in superior fabrics than they are in indulging in high fashion fantasy or sparking conversations that reach beyond clothing.

With his vision of the cinematic salaryman, Otsuki is able to do both: the menswear guys love it, and now we know that the front row do too. Doublet’s Masayuki Ino became the first Japanese designer to win the LVMH Prize back in 2018, but not since Undercover or Sacai has a brand caused as much conversation in the wider industry as Soshiotsuki. The jury is still somewhat out on the buyers (the only international stockists listed on the brand’s website are Huiben Shop in NYC and LA’s H.Lorenzo, though I know FWRD is picking it up from this season), but the brand reports that it is selling well.

Otsuki’s collections over the past few seasons have referenced the golden era of the salaryman, when the yen was at its height and guys were spending it on expensive Italian suits. On the surface it looks like he’s referencing Armani, but what he’s really riffing on is a Japanese perception of Western luxury, with Armani as a vector, splicing those Italian tailoring references with kimono silhouettes. Before Otsuki was hooked on the salaryman stuff, his designs took more literal cues from Japanese culture, with references to Shinto temples and ninja uniforms.

Otsuki has also spoken about observing an inferiority complex among Japanese people with their desire to dress in Western brands (and indeed how the Western business suit colonised the kimono), and so we might think of his brand as a melting down of Western and Japanese fashion in order to forge something genuinely new: tailoring that infuses the structure of a Western business suit with the easy elegance of a kimono.

Here in Paris, Otsuki’s impervious salaryman was on his summer holidays, captured in a rare moment of vulnerability. Shown on a sweaty summer evening in Paris, models walked the long stone courtyard in off duty suiting: sax blue shirts with collars poking out from baggy blazers, and coats slung over the arm as though heading home from a long day at the office, styled with closed-toe leather sandals and the brand’s retro-casual collab with ASICS.

Striped boxer shorts in paper-thin cotton peeked out from cut-offs worn with undone belts, and trousers were often knee-length, hemmed as though they had been rolled up for a paddle in the sea. “I wanted to express that specific feeling—the funny contrast of someone who is usually serious and strict letting loose at a resort, maybe even accidentally showing their underwear,” he said backstage afterwards.