Taiga Takahashi graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2017 and founded his label in New York the same year, under his own name. It signs itself T.T now, for reasons that come later on this page. He had been collecting American clothing since he was a teenager, mostly work clothing made between the 1920s and the 1950s, and the archive eventually ran to thousands of garments. What he did with it he called applied archaeology, and the label states the idea as “resurrecting relics of the past to unearth artifacts of the future.” The phrasing matters, because it is not a description of reproduction. He read a garment for its cloth, its sewing, and its detail, worked out why it had been made that way, and then made the thing that knowledge suggested rather than a copy of the thing that prompted it.
That method decides everything upstream of the garment, which is why the label works the way it does. Cloth is woven in Japan on old power looms, most of which have gone out of use, at the low speeds those machines run at. Dyeing is done by hand with natural dyes, using a practice the label describes as more than a thousand years old. Cutting and sewing are done by artisans working to the tolerances the originals were built to. The stated target is clothing that will last a hundred years, which is an unusual thing to design toward and rules out most of the ways clothing is now made. Pieces are named by lot number rather than by season, so the label’s own catalogue reads Lot.722 US Letter Carrier DB Jacket, or Lot.723 Work Trousers.
In December 2021 he opened T.T in Gion, in Kyoto, in a row of machiya, the wooden townhouses that line the district’s older lanes. It is not only a shop. Takahashi designed the architecture, the tea room, and the sculpture in it, and the clothing hangs on a single rail against white walls and old wood, with a dry landscape garden filling the window at the back. He was working as an artist as much as a designer by then, and the two practices were not kept apart.
He died on April 9, 2022, at twenty-seven. The Spring/Summer 2023 collection had been finished before he died and was released afterward. The label has been run since by the people who worked alongside him, and its own account of that is careful and worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: his legacy “has been transformed into the thoughts of the team that supported him during his lifetime and continues to be passed down.” From the Autumn/Winter 2023 collection onward the name on the label has been T.T, after the Kyoto shop. Both names belong to the same house, and this page uses Taiga Takahashi for the man and for the work made in his lifetime, and T.T for what the label has been since.
Taiga Takahashi/T.T at W Department
Longevity is the argument we make about almost everything in the store, and we usually make it on a garment’s behalf. Takahashi made it himself, and put a number on it. Designing toward a hundred years is a constraint that travels backward through every decision: which loom, at which speed, with which dye, at which seam allowance, and whether any of it can be done at the rate a season demands. The clothing that comes out the other end does not look like a manifesto. It looks like a jacket. That gap between how quietly it reads and how much had to be decided to get there is the reason we went looking for the label in the first place.
The second reason is the distinction the work turns on. A great deal of reconstructed American work clothing is reproduction, faithful to the original down to its flaws, and there is real skill in that. Applied archaeology is a different proposition, and a harder one, because it requires a judgment about what the original was for before anything is cut. It is the same judgment we are making whenever we choose anything, which is why this label belongs in the same conversation as the Japanese houses and the Americana-derived work we care most about rather than at the edge of it.
Continue Exploring
- Nigel Cabourn. The Newcastle designer who works from his own vintage archive of military, workwear, and expedition clothing, and the nearest thing to this method among the houses we work with.
- KUON. A Tokyo house building new clothing out of old Japanese cloth.
- 3sixteen. Denim, and cloth specified rather than bought finished.
- Engineered Garments. New York, and the American work and military pattern book read closely.
- Issey Miyake. Japan, and clothing that begins with a method rather than a silhouette.
- Denim at W Department. Across all the houses we work with.
- Trousers. Across all the houses we work with.
- Coats and jackets. Across all the houses we work with.
- How We Look at Clothes. Our writing on reading a garment before buying it.
- Getting Dressed as a Creative Act. Our writing on what choosing clothes is actually for.
- How to Build a Wardrobe. Our writing on building slowly rather than seasonally.
- Caring for What You Own. What to do at home, and what to leave to a specialist.
- The Library. Our writing on the houses we work with, plus the monthly playlist.
- Find us on The Plaza. 54½ Lincoln Avenue, open daily, 11 to 5.
Where to ask
Because the label numbers its garments rather than naming them, a lot number on its own tells you very little until somebody tells you what it was drawn from and why it was made that way. That is a conversation rather than a specification, and it is one we are glad to have. The store is open daily, 11 to 5, at 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza.