The Japanese Brand Driving Menswear Nuts Just Made a Splashy Online Debut

If you haven’t heard of A.Presse yet, you gon’ learn today. Word-of-mouth travels fast in the menswear world, and right now, few brands are stoking more chatter—more unabashed enthusiasm—than the ascendant Japanese label founded by designer Kazuma Shigematsu in 2021.

Shigematsu is a vintage obsessive of the highest order, and his appreciation for the hallmarks of classic-leaning workwear informs the trend-agnostic nature of his designs. By now, of course, “Americana-by-way-of-Japan” isn’t exactly a novel proposition, but by pinpointing the spirit of its reference pieces instead of trying to reproduce them wholesale, A.Presse upholds the mandate with elite finesse.

Shigematsu and his team have a penchant for dialing in the details to a surgical degree, yielding masterfully-executed riffs on hall-of-fame staples (with correspondingly high price tags to match).

Besides the sticker shock, though, the biggest downside is just how hard it is to find the stuff online. You could buy a smattering of the brand’s pieces via the legendary zeitgeist-readers at Union LA, but A.Presse’s distribution outside of Japan remains woefully limited. So imagine our excitement when we clocked a tight assortment of its wares on Mr Porter this week, jostling for digital shelf space with shimmering Dries Van Noten blazers and brolic Our Legacy knits.

There it all was, hazy and mirage-like, the capsule wardrobe menswear fever dreams are made of. There was the 1st Type denim jacket, a stunning cover of an all-time classic Levi’s trucker—note the front pleats, back buckle, and telltale pocket position—done up in indigo-dyed Japanese denim with more nuance than 99% of Prestige TV.

And there were the Type.3 chinos, a not-too-distant descendant of their original military counterparts, reupholstered in a sturdy-yet-silky cotton twill and cut with a silhouette that nods to the source material without kowtowing to it.

And there—oh, yes, there!—was the hooded canvas jacket, which looks like it’s made from a Carhartt-adjacent duck canvas until you realize what a heaping serving of silk can do to a fabric you’ve known your whole life, a sentiment you can apply to basically any garment with an A.Presse tag on it.

Check it all out for yourself while inventory lasts, and considered yourself learned.