The whirring neon city of Tokyo is a surprising treasure trove for vintage clothing collectors, where a mint Comme des Garçons bubble skirt can be had for $70 or so, if you’re willing to dig for it. Against that backdrop, one tightly curated shop stands above the rest: Laila, which is widely regarded as the city’s finest stockist by those in the know. More than a boutique, Laila is a focal point for Tokyo fashion obsessives, who want to compare their personal stockpiles of Margiela and Yohji. Riffing off that collective nature, Laila will this month launch printings.jp, a new site selling fashion-centric printed matter: magazines, photography and art books, catalogs, invitation cards, and more. It will also function as an independent publishing house, producing archival fashion books with the first, a limited set on Raf Simons, to begin shipping mid-January.
Hideo Hashiura, Laila’s director, recalls opening shop 15 years ago in an unassuming single-room storefront in Jingumae. Just up a set of faded blue stairs, he continues to sell pristine pieces from “maison brands” such as a collection of Yves Saint Laurent Safari jackets, butter-soft Courrèges knits, and clingy Alaïa. Much thought is put into the layout, the pieces painstakingly placed like objets on display. “I wanted to not only do sale of clothes with deep history, but also collect them over time and edit them with my own perspective,” Hashiura says. Four years ago, he opened Laila Tokio, a second Shibuya shop just eight minutes southwest, that focuses on the ’90s. There, you’ll find several neat stacks of deconstructed Margiela denim and Helmut Lang canvas sneakers in beautiful condition and number.
It is Tokio that directly inspired printings.jp, as through its establishment, Hashiura realized there were countless fashion fans hungry for the wildly influential, archival designs that inform fashion today. “I got to know that many people are looking at current fashion with the same memories as me,” he says, “and I started thinking to publish reference books that can connect [the past] with the future.” By chance, he met a business partner six months ago with an equal passion for clothing collection, and they decided to open printings.jp “to convey history through both clothes and printed materials.”
On the minimal black website, itself a throwback to the early days of the Internet, there are two menu options: “archive book” and “book archive.” The latter contains flat photographs of the rare printed material in stock: copies of Comme des Garçons’s Six magazine from 1988 to 1991, containing Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel photographs, or an off-white edition of A Magazine guest-edited by Margiela himself. The former reveals printing.jp’s first in-house publication on Simons, a set of two tomes labeled 1996-2001 and 2001-2006. Within their roughly 700 pages are cult items: the Pyramid bomber from Spring 2000’s “Summa Cum Laude” collection, or the Fall 2003 fishtail parka with Peter Saville’s basket of roses, from the New Order album cover for Power, Corruption Lies, patched on the back.
The pieces mainly belong to Hashiura and his cofounder (though they called upon a few friends to round out the selection), and they spent several months photographing them until they had more than 1,300 cuts. “The styles Raf Simons made have a profound influence on contemporary fashion,” Hashiura explains of why the Belgian designer was their first subject. There was an emotional element to it, too: “At the same time, it’s because of our shared fascination with Raf Simons’s clothes that we joined together to make these archive books in the first place.”
It may sound like a curious decision to open a print shop in this day and age, but Hashiura thinks the timing could not be better; from his vantage point in tech-savvy Tokyo, he sees a backlash against what’s disposable and a longing for things to be cherished. “I feel like now is a time in which fashion has something missing,” he says of the need to slow down and reflect. “I’m not saying this to praise the past and criticize the present, but by understanding the past, I think we could expand the future.” He also believes in the power of print. “Media like a book can reach even more people,” he says, “and through books, we want to convey genuine and original things and leave them to the future.”
