THINGS I LOVE vol.1

Hello. This is Tomoki Yuma.
I served as the creative director of LANVIN COLLECTION MEN’S for a total of seven seasons, but from fall/winter 2025, that role will be taken over by Takayuki Oshima (@oshima_takayuki) passed the baton to Mr. From now on, I will continue to watch over the men's line as a cheering leader.
From now on, I will be writing a series of columns about the clothes, accessories, and miscellaneous goods that are important to me, which I have collected over the past 40 years. In other words, “ This is a story about ``THINGS I LOVE''.
From the late '80s to the '90s to the present day, I've encountered, purchased, and worn many masterpieces by countless designers. This is my message to all of you.

The first item we will take up is Romeo Gigli.

"Romeo Gili" is something that I think most young people in their 20s or younger today don't know about. The brand created a huge sensation in the Milan collection, which had previously been dominated by Giorgio Armani, and became a hot topic in Japan in the 1980s.

I first encountered this brand at International Gallery Beams in Harajuku. Among the many over-designed clothes, a simple, beautiful shirt made of high-quality material was sitting in a square acrylic box. Although it was a designer brand, it was full of a dignified atmosphere without being eccentric. In later years, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, and others would release minimalist menswear one after another, and I think Romeo Gigli was the origin of that.

The shirt cost over 50,000 yen, which was an unprecedented price at the time, and even though I was a fashion fan, I remember being hesitant about purchasing it. After that, I bought a Jiri jacket called the "Uncon Jacket" (of course it was expensive), feeling like I was jumping off a stage in Shimizu. I wore it almost every day. Until then, he had been proposing styles such as ``shibu kazi'' and ``efdeje'' at work, but after meeting Jiri, he suddenly changed direction to fashionable men's fashion.

"Decontracté", which Giri proposed, means "unconstructed" in French. This was translated into English as "unconstructed," and was called the "unconstructed jacket." Nowadays we take it for granted that a jacket without shoulder pads is called that, but at the time it was an event that caused a huge sensation in men's fashion. I really like this ``Uncon Jacket'' and bought the first one at International Gallery Beams and the second one at Gili's shop in Milan. The patterns were exactly the same, but the first one was linen and the second one was made of finely ribbed corduroy. Depending on the material, the appearance will be completely different. Throughout the past year, I have been the Romeojiri man.

This time I wanted to show you the unconventional jacket, but I couldn't find it in the warehouse where the archives are kept, so I'll show you the lunch coat instead. This coat is also one that I wore heavily when I was a Jiri man. I could wear it over an unconventional jacket, and I was drawn to the combination of the muted navy blue (though it's gotten a little dull over the years) and the golden brown on the boa.

　
After that, Romeo Gigli developed the diffusion brand ``G Gigli'' in Japan, but it never caught on to the big Milanese boom of Prada, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana in the late 1990s, and eventually fell into oblivion.

However, there is no doubt that Romeo Gigli's influence on men's fashion in the early 1990s had a major influence on men's style that continues today. Come to think of it, it has become a legend that a young Alexander McQueen knocked on the door of Romeo Gigli's atelier and trained there, albeit for a short period of time.

■Tomoki Yuma (@stsukezane）
Born in Kyoto City in 1965. Started his career as an editor in the editorial department of Magazine House ``POPEYE''. Currently, in addition to planning and styling fashion pages for magazines, she also designs advertising costumes for artists and musicians. Before the coronavirus, he covered men's collections in Paris and Milan for over 35 years.

THINGS I LOVE vol.2