How Auralee Became the Japanese Brand of the Moment

Auralee is one of the defining menswear brands of the moment. For the past four seasons, it has occupied the first major slot on the Paris Fashion Week Men’s calendar, and has become so much of a must-see that the traveling circus of editors and buyers adjust their flights from Milan to catch it. This season is set to be Auralee’s grandest showcase yet, held in the opulent Odéon Theatre in the city’s 6th arrondissement.

Known for its subtle-yet-distinct color palette and preposterously tactile fabrics, Auralee is part of the growing cohort of Japanese brands that’s boomed in recent times. The Tokyo-based label was founded in 2014 by Ryota Iwai, a kindly 43-year-old from Kobe, and is celebrated in particular for its fastidious material development. Traveling to Mongolia to source alpaca wool, South Africa for kid mohair, or to Iwate in northern Japan for homespun tweed, Iwai goes to great lengths to source the fabrics that become the core of each collection.

But the brand’s global fan base has not been built on textiles alone. The designer combines these materials with a natty sense for relaxed silhouettes and variegated colors (pieces are often yarn-dyed to achieve original hues that range from postbox red to pistachio cream), as well as the intelligent styling of Charlotte Collet. The brand’s artfully faded denim jackets and floaty plaid wool shirts cost around £500, while pieces in more premium materials, like a minimal calf hair blouson, can reach beyond £3,500. Though the idea is that these luxurious-feeling pieces are still easy to introduce into daily life. It’s paying off: revenues grew approximately 20% year-on-year in 2024, and are on track to rise the same again for 2025, exceeding company expectations.

Unlike many designers in Japan trying to break into the international market, Auralee didn’t start showing in Tokyo. Thanks to winning the Fashion Prize of Tokyo in 2018, it headed straight to Paris. “The prize money didn’t cover everything, but it helped me to hold a show in Paris,” Iwai tells me at his beige-carpeted Tokyo showroom two weeks out from the SS27 show. At that time, the designer was vaguely aware that he wanted to expand, but had never even been to a fashion show, let alone held his own. “I just wanted to try it.”

Showing internationally has been pivotal to its success. Before showing in Paris, the brand had just 10 international retail accounts, including a handful of stores in South Korea and online with Mr Porter, who put in large orders early. “Our first season in Paris added just a few more, but over the following two seasons, that number doubled,” says Kanae Arai, Iwai’s wife who heads up communications for the brand. Auralee’s international growth continued to progress smoothly during the pandemic, and enjoyed a strong uptick in 2023, which the brand attributes to the post-Covid shopping boom. Auralee currently employs approximately 50 people, consisting of around 20 corporate employees and 30 store staff.

While agenda-setting independent retailers — or “benchmark stores” as Iwai calls them — like C’H’C’M in New York and Mouki Mou in London helped establish Auralee abroad, its wholesale roster of big multi-brand names now forms the backbone of the business. The brand does 80% of its sales through over 100 stockists globally, including department stores like Harrods and Liberty, as well as Net-a-Porter, Farfetch, and Ssense. The remaining share goes to direct-to-consumer (DTC), with 15% through physical retail (the brand has a flagship store in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood) and 5% through its own e-commerce channel.

More physical retail is on the horizon, and one of the brand’s main focuses in the coming years will be an expansion of its stores, with flagships in major cities. “We’d like to open stores in Paris and more in Japan, but we haven’t found the right property yet,” says Iwai, adding that he plans to open in Osaka and Paris within the next five years.

For a ‘Made in Japan’ label like Auralee, however, this success can have its limits, and the fragility of its supply chain is increasingly coming into focus. Domestic factories are struggling to stay open due to factors such as an ageing population and labor shortages, as many craftspeople reach retirement without finding a successor to pass on their skills and knowledge to. “It’s the issue I’m most concerned about,” he says. “Certain things that could be done five years ago are no longer possible [because factories have closed].”

Iwai rattles off a graveyard of factories he used to work with, from yarn-dyeing experts specialized in certain colors, to unique textile developers. “If you start listing them, it just keeps going on,” he says. The shrinking manufacturing base also means more lead time for production. “Making samples takes twice as long as it did five years ago. When I think about whether we’ll be able to make things the same way in 10 years, I expect it’s going to be difficult.”

At present, he has not had to put any limits on scaling the business due to factory closures, but remains cautious. “There are definitely some significant drawbacks, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to switch to factories in China or anything like that,” he says. “I really hope that young people will become interested in this kind of work again and that it will continue for a little longer. But it’s such a difficult problem.”

Considering Auralee’s fabrics are what sets the brand apart from its competitors, more closures are a sobering prospect. But the designer remains passionate about supporting his suppliers in Japan, and plans to power through the closures as much as possible, adapting to what is available locally. “I’m not the type of person who can work overseas,” he says. “I really like to oversee everything: the condition of the yarn, the raw materials, the dyeing, the finishing, and so on.”

Ryota Iwai travels the world to source and develop fabrics.

Iwai talks to his suppliers at every stage of the process, keeping an eye on everything and getting to know them personally. “Because we can communicate well, it’s really easy for me to create things with them,” he explains.

Ahead of his show in Paris this week, which will welcome around 300 people, Iwai is busy but cool, with his sights set on the long term. Does he care about the pressure of being a seasonal hot ticket? “I don’t really care that much about popularity or anything like that. It’s just nice, that’s all.” Instead, he says, the show will be about building on what he’s done so far, in a way that he hopes is incrementally better every time. “That’s my mission — that I absolutely have to make something good.”