Snow on the Mountains

Notes from a trunk show in Karuizawa

The train from Tokyo takes about an hour, which is not enough time to prepare yourself for the change. You leave a city of fourteen million and step off onto a platform in the mountains, and the first thing I saw when I came through the gates in April was snow still sitting on the peaks. Mount Asama, an active volcano, holding its white all the way into spring.

Karuizawa sits high, and it has been a place people escape to for a long time. It began as a post town on the old Nakasendō, the highway that carried travelers between Kyoto and Edo. Then in the late nineteenth century foreign missionaries and expatriates discovered that the altitude made the summers bearable, and it became a retreat. Cool, wooded, quiet in a way Tokyo never is. Kyū-Karuizawa Ginza, the old main street, still has the feeling of a place built for people who came here to slow down.

I was there for a trunk show for LA LOOP, at a shop called Maison ma Manière.

I want to write about the shop, because I have been in a great many stores in twenty-six years of doing this, and very few of them stay with me the way this one has.

Ryuta Shimada opened it in 2022, in the town where he grew up. It is not large. You could walk the whole floor in a minute if you were the sort of person who walked through stores that way, which, standing in it, you immediately understand you are not. On one rack: workwear and military pieces, some of them more than a hundred years old, hanging beside a current-season Japanese label. Along the floor, a long row of New Balance, grey and cream and faded, lined up on the wood with a little handwritten card tucked into each pair. Trench coats. A.P.C. beside Dries. Vintage from Paris, from Brazil, from wherever he had most recently been.

And then, on a shelf, Hermès scarves from the 1920s.

I picked one up and fell in love with it. That is the whole story of that moment and I am not going to dress it up. It was in my hands and it was a hundred years old and it was extraordinary, and Ryuta had found it somewhere in the world and carried it back to a small shop in a mountain town in Nagano because he thought it belonged there.

That is the thing I keep turning over.

He travels, really travels, to find these pieces. Not to a trade show where the work is done for you, but out into the world, hunting. And then he brings them home to a room where perhaps forty people a day walk in. The economics of that should not work. In every framework I know for how retail is supposed to scale, it does not work.

Except that he knows his customers. Not in the way we mean when we say that phrase in a board meeting, with a segmentation chart behind us. He knows them. He buys a jacket in Paris and he already knows whose shoulders it is for. He remembers what they bought last spring and what they said about it. His store is small on purpose, because the smallness is what makes the knowing possible.

His own way of putting it, on the shop's website, is that clothes carry "the time through which they were living, and every history they made." He wants people to wear like themselves. That is not marketing copy. You can see it in how the racks are arranged, in the shoe trees, in the fact that nothing in the room is trying to sell you anything at all.

I make an object that people wear on their bodies, every day, for years. A retainer is not a garment, but it is the same kind of thing: it lives with you, it holds something you need, it gets a patina. Standing in that shop I felt more clearly than I have in a long time why I have refused, over and over, to make LA LOOP bigger in the ways people have suggested I make it bigger. Because the alternative is this. Passion, care, a hundred-year-old scarf carried across the world by hand, and a man who loves his work so visibly that it changes the temperature of the room.

I flew home with the scarf. And I had made a new friend.

The mountains stayed with me too, still holding their snow in April, in no hurry at all to be anything other than what they are.

Maison ma Manière, Kyū-Karuizawa, Nagano.