"Shopping Japan With Four Pins" is an ongoing series in which Amardeep Singh takes us on a tour of the country's best shops. See them all here.
Part IV: Minotaur, Tokyo
The fact that brands as impressive as Minotaur can exist on a relatively obscure level even in Japan and essentially not exist in North America at all is something that consistently shocks me. Maybe the audience isn't there in the States. Maybe this circle of weird-but-very-advanced-and-super-neat-menswear-appreciating men is way smaller than any of us realize. Maybe it's the semi-isolated cultural history of Japan that keeps things like this from spreading faster globally, which seems more likely when considering how terribly designed most Japanese websites are and how reluctant the stores seem to be to ship overseas. Or maybe it's just the logistics of it all coupled with my personal analysis of Japan not really being as technologically advanced as people in the West assume it is. (You're seriously telling me that I'm not allowed to use a credit card at any McDonalds in the entire country?) Whatever the reason, it's keeping very ready buyers in our next of the woods from giving their money to the designers and producers that are actively trying to obtain it in the East, and seeing this continue to happen in 2015 is an odd, slightly confusing feeling. Now that we're on the same foggy, confusing page, let's talk about Minotaur.
Wandering the backstreets of a trendy neighborhood like Nakameguro was an activity I went into knowing would lead to some interesting discoveries. The neighborhood is packed with mostly unheard of shops (like our previous feature, 1LDK) that impress with their comprehensiveness, uniqueness, sheer size or, as is the case here with Minotaur, all of the above. Located within earshot of the river and the many shops that line it, Minotaur is easy to find as it fills up the corner of an otherwise dormant intersection with it's large glass window panels and bold type logo. The second shop of this relatively small brand (the first being in Fukuoka, in southern Japan), the brand's look sits square in the middle of super high-tech jawnery and casual, subtle every day wear. Sure, a very slim tightrope to be walking, but one that Minotaur does seamlessly, blending low-key advanced fabrics with high-key advanced silhouettes so well that I was disappointed in myself for not having discovered the brand earlier. It reminded me a lot of White Mountaineering, (the first feature of this series), with the complexity of the garments from a production standpoint, especially evident in the gradient peacoat (pictured), which somehow shifts from navy to grey slowly without any garment-dying, and in a herringbone pattern at that. Or, a blue jacket (pictured) made of some very futuristic, crispy Tyvek-like fabric, which the owner and designer or Minotaur, Eiichi Izumi, was wearing when I came into the shop. Minotaur is a large, impressive line with another new store, their third, opening soon in Shibuya, so this is certainly a brand to look out for with your Japanese proxy, or maybe even with some US retailers hopefully soon (they're currently only carried at Haven in North America) as the webshop is still strictly in Japanese.
Minotaur
1 Chome-18-14
Aobadai, Meguro, Tokyo 153-0042, Japan
Amardeep Singh is a writer and photographer living in New York. You can see more of his work here and follow him on Twitter here.
