Auralee
Tokyo, Japan — founded 2015
Ryota Iwai spent his early career on the production side of Japanese textile mills before starting Auralee, and the brand still reads like a mill's showroom rather than a designer's: yarn counts and dye lots matter more than season themes. Shapes are ordinary on purpose — a T-shirt, a coat, a knit vest — so that the only thing left to notice is what the cloth is doing.
Auralee works with some of the last small spinners left in Japan, several on the edge of closing, and buys enough of a yarn to keep a mill running another year. The clothes are sized generously and cut without darts, so the hand of the fabric is never fighting the construction.
The tell
Look at the sweatshirt fleece: it is spun noticeably heavier than any mass mill would allow, from a mill-dyed yarn with a slight, uneven depth of colour that a garment-dyed piece never has. No logo will confirm it — the weight in the hand will.
Signature pieces
- Wool melton chester coat
- Heavy cotton pile sweatshirt
- High-gauge merino knit vest
- Washed cotton twill trouser
At a glance
- Founded
- 2015
- Base
- Tokyo, Japan
- Price tier
- ●●○ Considered
- Categories
- Ready-to-wear, Knitwear