Poggy was already defending this philosophy when he started working for United Arrows & Sons in 1997, a sort of menswear department store, but it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill old-school store with the same selection of brands and items season after season. We’re talking about the rise, back then, of Tokyo’s Harajuku neighbourhood, specifically in its Southside in Ura-Harajuku, in which originally, streetwear stores like Goodenough, NEIGHBORHOOD and Undercover, between many others that are now top of mind in 2019, were found. United Arrows & Sons was highly influenced by these stores, but the big difference was that they mixed luxury and streetwear, as their most coveted item was the tailored suit. And yet they also sold bomber jackets, jeans and sneakers.
POGGY, THE MASTER OF COLLABORATIONS
Motofumi Kogi, aka Poggy or Poggy The Man, is known as a legend in the world of collaborations after creating pieces and even collections, whether it be under his name or under the name of the store United Arrows & Sons, which he’s director of. For example, in just three years he has worked with Puma, Levi’s and Converse. And even though as a concept collaborations only started getting trendy from this decade onwards, Poggy has been defending the collaborative spirit for more than twenty years.
Poggy was kind of a curator, what’s also understood as a buyer, who selected the best items appreciating quality over the brand name, and he let the customer mix and match pieces that they liked. This was a completely novel notion for such a homogeneous society like the Japanese one from that era, and it was especially revolutionary for men, or at least those office men who always wore the same suit. That’s when people started recognising every single person’s own style, authenticity and originality over fads, in a country where uniformity was most important.
Slowly but surely Poggy’s style started to become well-known, especially outside of Japan. His distinguished look that is comprised by his tall-brimmed hat, flashy suit and sneakers, with which he always manages to mix different styles ended up appearing in every single street style blog starting from the 2000s. That’s why brands started approaching him through the store he worked for, which he later became director of, to collaborate with him. The idea was to release unique models co-designed by him that would later be sold exclusively through United Arrows & Sons.
But, how does Poggy think a good collaboration should look like? For him, in a collaboration, the Japanese concept of ‘musubareru’, meaning knotted together, must always be present. It’s about weaving together different styles, traditions and philosophies in an organic way, as if it were a marriage, and creating something that’s new, original and never-before-seen. And that is what Poggy has been doing from the start of his career, creating close ties with other aesthetics and cultures, without being afraid of mixing streetwear and luxury to be able to create a unique, incomparable and inimitable style.
