The cult of the Japanese suit: What’s behind the love for the two-piece in Singapore?

SINGAPORE – Japanese brand Beams is opening a one-year pop-up at New Bahru on April 28, effectively its first boutique in Singapore.

Even from a distance, the department store best known for its in-house clothing lines has paradoxically managed to corner both the cult and mass markets here. Fans know the brand’s 1976 Harajuku origins. Casuals buy its T-shirts as souvenirs from Japan, where the chain operates 167 stores.

The upcoming launch here has sent ripples of excitement through the local fashion scene, while incidentally eclipsing the lesser-known but earlier success of its made-to-order arm, Custom Tailor Beams.

It concluded its third trunk show here in a year on March 29, a by-appointment event where clients are personally fitted for suits by Beams creative director Tatsuya Nakamura and expert fitter Tamao Shirai, who fly in from Japan.

Notably, the inaugural Singapore trunk show in March 2025 was the sub-brand’s first overseas, and local demand has been so keen that every edition has been fully booked.

Ten more orders were placed at the latest three-day run than the last, and there are plans to make the visits regular. Prices for suits started at $2,180. 

The strictures of the gentleman’s costume may seem at odds with Beams’ casual Americana catalogue – famed for its striped tees and slouchy jeans – but, says Mr Nakamura, it makes up 20 per cent of total sales.

When The Straits Times meets him at trunk show venue and local menswear store Colony Clothing in UE Square, he is eager to demonstrate why.

The menswear chief gets down on his haunches, seeking the best angle to show the play of a jacket’s collar – the perfect curve like a frown – that when worn will leave no gap between neck and cloth.

That arc is the mark of a good suit, he explains in Japanese, speaking through an interpreter.

Later, he takes off his jacket and scrunches it into a ball, and is delighted when it naturally resettles into an unwrinkled shape. “This is very light fabric from Naples,” he declares.

The subtext: Not all suits are made equal.

And Japanese tailoring, in particular, has its adherents. Interest in the Japanese suit is mounting internationally, in part because of a persistent fascination with Japanese menswear which has become a byword for something unique and elite, as well as the rise of ready-to-wear Tokyoite suiting brands.

Chief among the latter is Soshiotsuki, winner of the LVMH Prize for emerging designers in 2025 and purveyor of viral, rakishly oversized two-pieces. Several price points down, mass-market retailer Uniqlo turns out sets under $200 that have drawn repeated paeans from menswear magazine GQ.

All this develops upon the formidable cult of moody, minimalist suits popularised by the 1970s class of breakout Japanese designers Kenzo Takada, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. Their whittled-down sets became the uniform of non-conformism, beloved by architects and avant-garde film directors.

Asian build

Local interior designer Vincent Li is passionate about niche Nagoya label Black Sign. The 32-year-old owns three suits from the brand and got married in one.

He says: “I wear a lot of Japanese brands, so naturally my suits would be from Japanese brands.”

It is a question of sensibility. American brands try to appeal to the main, while Japanese labels excel at supplying fringe tastes, he says.

His wedding suit was a pinstripe number with peaked lapels and a belt back – a belt buckle detail sewn into the back of the jacket – a 1930s design cue.

At 1.8m and 65kg, his unusually lanky frame does not fit standard Western sizing, though a decent medium to large Japanese cut does the trick.

He says: “People notice my suits are cut a bit differently, so I get compliments on them.”

Mr Cai Foong, co-founder and managing partner of home-grown tailoring joint Hertslet & Co, says Asians tend to carry themselves head down and shoulders rolled forward. This hunched posture creates the “unsightly collar gap” Mr Nakamura decries and is something that Mr Foong says Japanese tailoring accounts for in construction.

He reckons suit-producing menswear retailers like United Arrows and Beams, ubiquitous in Japan, are better known in Singapore than the historic epicentre of tailoring, the London street Savile Row.

Beams has been stocked at Japanese retailer Lumine’s Raffles City store since 2024.

“(Japanese tailoring) has slowly gained prominence over the last five to 10 years as bigger brands come into Singapore. People realise it’s better than squeezing your body into a suit that is not made for you,” says Mr Foong.

Ambiguity of the Japanese suit

For all its devotees, the jury is still out on whether a Japanese style of suiting even exists.

The East Asian country does not have the pedigree of traditional suiting powerhouses Britain, Italy, or even America. The trail of the 400-year-old garment began belatedly in Japan in the early Meiji period, when the government mandated Western dress for officials, drawing on the civilising subtext of the suit to telegraph modern politics. That was in 1884, but it was not until the post-war era that the suit’s popularity went mainstream.

Mr Nakamura is conscious of this borrowing from other cultures. Beams began selling suits off the rack in the late 1970s, shortly after founding, in a straightforward importation of a New York trend, he says.

He is equally hesitant to ascribe a national character for suits, when there are so many levels to the craft.

Skill is the watchword here. He says: “What is important is the factory that does the sewing. There are a few in Japan with experienced workers that can do small details well and make suits of good quality.”

These rival, or even surpass, Italian make, yet they co-exist with cost-cutting factories.

One tell is the canvas, the interlining of a jacket that gives otherwise flat fabric crucial volume in the breast.

At Beams, horsehair canvas is sewn into the fabric with stitches so neat they leave no bumps. The process is the most time-consuming part of production. A single suit takes 10 hours to make, more than triple the three hours spent on a mass-market suit.

Slapdash factories tend to just glue the canvas on, adds Mr Nakamura.

But the process really begins at the fitting stage. Mr Nakamura says veteran tailors at Beams can draft flattering suits for customers of all proportions, to make short legs look longer, and bigger people slimmer.

It comes down to skill once again. In Beams’ 100-strong fitting squad, there may be only five of the calibre of Mr Shirai, who has spent some 40 years in the business. But the company has enough institutional knowledge to instruct its freshmen, Mr Nakamura adds.

He says: “It takes experience. It takes a long time, much touching of bodies, much measuring and seeing many people.”

Colony Clothing founder and designer Kozo Kawamura makes the case that Japanese suits have a sensibility indebted to, but not a perfect copy of, older suiting schools.

He says: “American, British, Italian and French tailoring all have their own distinct character. Japanese suiting developed by studying those traditions closely, digesting them and reconstructing them with a uniquely Japanese sense of balance.

“In that sense, Japanese sensibility is about refinement, editing and integration.”

It is a logic he applies to ramen and Japanese curry too. These dishes were imports that over time were made original by Japan, he adds.

Likewise for Colony Clothing. The 13-year-old brand founded in Singapore preaches a new colonial style: reinterpreting Western prep for an Asian lifestyle with a Japanese touch – a term which lately has the feel of a catch-all for quality. Prices range from $150 to $1,300. 

Punctilious attention to detail is part of the secret, says Mr Kawamura. “(In tailoring) this can be seen not only in design, but also in service, hospitality and the careful workmanship of factories.”

Mr Foong says that while stitches on jackets are typically spaced about 2mm apart, it is not uncommon to see gaps of 1mm or less on a Japanese-made suit. This exactitude is the primary mark of Japanese make, much more than any claim to a Japanese look, he adds.

“What they do best is precision. They take the style from others, but refine it in their own way by making (suits) the best possible version of the original.”

Singapore suits up?

The overseas yen for Japanese suits comes at an opportune time as demand for the classic garment cools within the country’s borders.

Mr Nakamura says nationwide sales have declined in the post-pandemic rewrite of corporate norms as suits, once de rigueur in offices, give way to more casual dress.

Yet as demand tapers in Japan, interest in the suit appears to be on the ascendant here.

Mr Nakamura goes to Florence, Italy, for famed menswear trade show Pitti Uomo twice a year. Fifteen years ago, Korean and Japanese people were the only Asian representatives he saw, but since then, he has observed more besuited South-east Asians in the mix.

The growth, coupled with greater South-east Asian clientele for Custom Tailor Beams’ services in Japan, is why he thought to hold a trunk show here in the first place.

The age range of customers here is also larger than that of the Japanese base. Mr Shirai says men in their early 20s to 60s placed orders here, compared with the 30s to 50s regulars in Japan.

The diverse body types here present some challenge to the tailors, who on their third rodeo now know to prepare 18 sizes, from size 42 to 58, for try-ons.

Mr Nakamura observes a more fundamental difference. Singaporeans are more laid-back than Japanese customers, who can take ages to select a button even with his expert advice, he says. “There are many maniacs (there),” he adds, laughing.

Amid Japan’s suit recession, the people who have continued wearing suits do so out of choice now, he says. “Before the pandemic, suits were like a uniform in Japan. But it is now a form of dressing up; it’s fancy and worn by those who want to be different.”

The situation has even prompted “activism”: Sebiro Sanpo, or “suit walk”, is a Japanese movement founded in 2023 that gathers enthusiasts for a jaunt in their suits to celebrate the blazer as everyday wear rather than restrictive workplace dress code.

Suits are going more casual here too, for a local base learning to wear the garment regularly.

Colony Clothing’s breezy ready-to-wear propositions are its bestsellers, outperforming its custom, more classic tailoring, says Mr Kawamura. Where Japanese people once made up the bulk of his clientele 13 years ago, he is now seeing more customers from Singapore and South-east Asia.

Hertslet & Co’s Mr Foong is also receiving orders clearly not destined for office cubicles or wedding aisles, the traditional drivers of the suit business here.

Instead, more among his Gen Z-to-millennial clientele have been coming in for sportscoats – a relaxed kind of jacket that does not have matching pants – as well as linen suits and louder checks. These leisure-style orders have doubled since 2022, he says.

More educated buyers are also turning up. First-time suit buyers no longer need the basics of a suit to be explained to them at length in consultation sessions, he says. Rather, they are the ones posing clever questions, forcing tailors to justify their prices.

Singaporean men could just be getting more style-conscious or leery of looking common.

Lately, Mr Foong has been getting orders for tailored bermudas. Starting at $189, they cost four to five times more than the Uniqlo go-tos, but they look distinct, he says.

“People are asking, ‘What can be tailored?’ And the answer is, literally everything.”

He even takes bespoke Japanese denim commissions. A popular ask is to make pockets at the sides of the pants, like a pair of trousers, rather than at the front. 

He says: “Because there’s not much suit-wearing culture here, every person in Singapore kind of looks the same. We have T-shirt culture. Ever since the expansion of information online, people are trying to differentiate themselves.

“They realise that styling matters, image matters. That is what is driving this.”