If you’re buying Uniqlo now for the quality and price, pretty soon you’ll also be doing so for its cool factor.
“At the right moment, you have to be desirable. If you’re not fashionable, you’re not desirable,” said John Jay, president of global creative of Fast Retailing Co., which owns the Japanese brand, at the presentation of its Spring-Summer 2016 collections early this month in Tokyo.
Jay was reacting to previous statements by founder and president Tadashi Yanai that “Uniqlo is not a fashion brand but a technology brand,” underscoring its expertise in creating everyday basics injected with innovative fixes to what may seem like ordinary concerns, like cool and light innerwear in the form of its Airism line or heat-generating apparel in its HeatTech collection.
Relevant, inspiring
“In the beginning those statements were all true, but we have to evolve,” said Jay. “It’s true that we don’t see ourselves as a traditional fashion company. We’re not a fast-fashion company where we look at something on the runway and create our cheap version of it; that’s not our goal. But to say that fashion is the enemy can’t be further from the truth.”
As if to prove his point, Jay, an award-winning Asian-American advertising veteran who was tapped to head the company’s global creative—a post created for him—early this year, staged a Uniqlo fashion show for the first time ever, to present what the company now calls its LifeWear collection, or comfortable, everyday apparel styled to each individual’s taste and lifestyle.
“We have to be relevant and inspiring,” he said. “Those basics are a big part of our business but they have to change, and you have to put them in a context of how you wear it, different from how you wore it 10 years ago. We’re paying a lot more attention to [wardrobe] coordination than ever before. It’s not good for these basics to be objectified as items; they have to relate to the silhouette, and the silhouette should relate to the culture.”
Jay was responsible for launching Uniqlo in 1999, when he was global creative director of the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. It was his idea to present the clothes as people would wear them—say, sleeves rolled up on a mannequin, and not simply folded and piled up on the retail floor.
With Yanai’s goal of becoming the world’s No. 1 fashion retailer by 2020 (it’s at No. 3 or 4 at the moment), Uniqlo has made headway toward this trajectory. After it launched its first overseas store in London in 2001 and New York in 2006, it’s now in 17 countries, with recent openings in Russia and Belgium. It has over 800 stores in Japan alone, and 27 in the Philippines since it opened in June 2012.
“We are barely off the launch pad,” said Jay. “In five years you won’t recognize this company.”
Bucking the moves of other fashion brands, Uniqlo has largely stayed away from big-name global celebrities to sell the brand, save for world No. 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic, its most famous endorser.
Collaborations
Even in its design collaborations, it has stayed niche, preferring to tap non-marquee names, but with serious design and fashion cred, over high-profile individuals.
There’s Ines de la Fressange, French fashion icon and former Chanel muse, who will roll out her fifth collection for Uniqlo in 2016, inspired by travel and sports.
There’s also former Hermès womenswear designer Christophe Lemaire, whose label Lemaire just created its second collection for Uniqlo for spring, of easy, generous and versatile shapes in lightweight and technical knits.
And then there’s Carine Roitfeld, former French Vogue editor, whose second Uniqlo collection will be available for the first time in the Philippines, composed of chic separates for the working woman, like cropped bomber jackets paired with sleek pencil skirts in wrinkle-free fabrics.
With the overwhelming success of these three collaborations, Uniqlo has been proving that pop stars and actors aren’t the only way to go in creating noise and desirability for a brand. It’s immaterial to the Japanese company whether one has many followers on social media or none.
“If they are niche,” Jay noted, “we say, ‘we respect your point of view, and as you control this niche, let us help you touch the lives of one million, five million, 10 million people.’”
Yanai brought up the idea of working with De la Fressange to Uniqlo design director Naoki Takizawa when the chief executive read the Frenchwoman’s style book, “Parisian Chic,” which mentions Uniqlo as among the brands in her high-low style mix.
Takizawa, an industry veteran who was once creative director of Issey Miyake, recalled, through his translator, “She (De la Fressange) may not be a designer, but Mr. Yanai said maybe we can work with our best clients in the world… When we launched her first collection here, a hundred people lined up in the rain, and these are regular people, not fashion people.”
Natural choice
Takizawa noted that Roitfeld’s affinity with a brand like Uniqlo may even be farther than De la Fressange’s.
“If Uniqlo had stayed in just the casual category, there wouldn’t be a collaboration with Carine,” he said. But since the brand wanted to tap the everyday working woman, to provide her with stylish clothing not just for the office but for dinner afterward, the French high-fashion editor was a natural choice.
“Before she’s an editor, she’s a woman,” said the Japanese designer. “She has worked with Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Ford… She has that woman’s perspective… a lot of women can share those values. It’s the mix of styling that will move it forward. That’s when her editing skills come in.”
“LifeWear and being iconic doesn’t mean it has to be boring,” Jay pointed out. “It comes to life in the imagination of the people… Simple is the entry point, not the end point. It’s an endless endeavor.”
What people seem to be confused about, according to Yuki Katsuta, Uniqlo head of research and design, is that, since Uniqlo also talks a lot about the longevity of its clothes, you never have to buy again once you buy one.
But then the “customer recognizes the difference from the basic they bought last year to the one they’re buying today,” he said. “We improve on function [if not] every season, then every year.”
“Style is innovation, too,” Jay said. “You have a HeatTech item and you think you’ll never buy again. But our HeatTech will improve and will be 10 percent warmer next year… Even the most iconic item will keep improving.”
Daunting
Redesigning basics can actually be more daunting than creating entirely new apparel, Katsuta said. They add or subtract, whether it’s a detail, the fabrication, or even the colorway.
“I ask my people to make a sample for them to wear so they understand,” he said. “I do that, too. I’ll wear something every day for, say, 10 days straight to see how it changes, to see things I didn’t recognize the previous day or week… My question to the designer always is, ‘Did you wear it? No? Try it on for a couple of days and come back to me.’”
As a Japanese brand, there’s constant innovation, Jay said, and those subtle changes may not even be visible. It could be in the design or technology, or in the manufacturing process, which could make, say, luxury items like cashmere cheaper.
What these executives are saying simply is that, it’s a continuous evolution for this brand in its quest for world domination. It’s unafraid to make bets, including costly ones.
“This company is fearless,” Jay said. “That’s Mr. Yanai, [he says] bet big, don’t be afraid, make mistakes, don’t worry about it… Technology will force you to change if you’re to survive. The world is changing at a rapid pace. If you don’t change on your own terms, you’re going to be forced to change on somebody else’s.”