the whole interview is here:
Placing Things Where They Should Be
BEHIND THE CORNER of the notorious Harajuku rossing, behind the flood of kids in crazy colour costumes, there is the headquarters of W-Taps Visual Uparmored in an old building on the ground floor. When you walk through the heavy metal door, you'll see the sanctuary of street culture. Covered in industrial lights, lines of Harley and Triumph bikes, and piles of CDs, books and analogue videotapes line the walls. This is the atelier of Tetsu Nishiyama aka TET, the co-founder of Neighborhood, one of the leading streetwear labels in Japan, and the designer of his own label W-Taps. W-Taps (pronounced Double Taps) unique approach to military clothing, blending them with his love of skate and bike culture earned him a global reputation as one of the most talented designers in street fashion. His followers are not only the kids on the street but also world-renowned artists, stylists, msicans and even huge compamies such as Nike and Vans. Having grown up in Shibuya, the center of Tokyo, unlike most designers who come to the captial from all over Japan, he was able to experience every part of underground culture that happened there. He is the golden child of Harajuku Street fashion and one of its finest products. Here Tet talks exclusively about his history, his influences about the 4 main elements in his career. This is the story of how street brands have survived and where they are heading. Weclome to the world of Visual Uparmored.
MOTORCYCLE
"Motorcycles and skateboards are my main cultural backbone and creative resource. My first bike was a Steed, Honda's version of a Harley Davidson - an American style bike with a laid back seat and a relatively long fork. Soon after, whilst I was in high school, I bought my first Harley, a Shovelhead, form Shinsuke Takizawa aka Takishin, my old friend who is the founder and designer of Neighborhood, parent compay of W-Taps. I think Harleys are the kind of bikes you can grow with. All American cars/motocycles are manufactured at the end of the 70s are like that. Manmade, no computer chip bullshit, you know? I learned that there is a saying in AMerica, 'Motorcycle Makes A Man'. I guess it means that men learn how to fx and work things out through building and maintaining a motorcycle. You definitely learn so much when owning a bike. You basically learn the process of how to find a problem and how to fix it. I love this way of thinking. As I said, any motorcylce or car made in the 70s, you can usually fix on your own 'cause they're analogue machines. My '79 Shovelhead is the first and only Harley that I've rebuilt from scratch. I mean, from head-totoe. I even placed the piston ring by myself. I've been riding this bike since I was in high school and I don't think I would ever consider letting this bike go and buying another. This is the bike I'll grow old with. The reason why I got into Harleys was because of my interest in B class biker movies from the 60s and 70s. My first love of American culture was with skateboarding and BMX, and then it somehow led me to bikes. Nowadays, it's pretty common to find ex-skaters who are into bikes. Riding Harley with Vans sneakers, Dickies etc. Back then there was nobody who was into both. I somehow got into them and am still doing it. For me, skatboarding is the creative use of terrain. Have you ever seen the famosu photo of the legend Julien Stranger ollie-ing over a crack in the ground after an earthquake in San Francisco? That's the essence of skateboarding you know? It's about working things out on your own and finding your own path. It's an abstract creation in a way. Motorcycles are a more direct and simple creation. Build things up. Very DIY. Ilearned the meaning of craftsmanship through motorcylces. Makin gthings with your own hands. I think that becaome the foundation for me. Maybe it's hard to see from my products because it's not obvious. It's more like my approach towards things. I've never learnt fashion formerly, I just learnt by doing. Just like I did with motorcycles. I don't know why I was so attracted to motorcycles and skateboards Maybe because they are considered as otsider cultre made by outcasts for outcasts. Skateboarding is neither a school activity nor a team sport. It's an individual expression, a ways of life. So too is the motorcycle. You ride your bike the way you want to, you don't have to deal with anything else. I was an outcast in school and all my friends were like that too. That made a huge impact on my developing tastes. Punk, skateboarding and motorcylces. As you know, my generation was so interested in American cultre, which was at the centre of everything bakc then. Movies, music and fashion. I was born and raised in Shibuya, the centre of Japanese youth culture so it was natural for me to get involved."
SILKSCREEN
"Silkscreen printing was my first foray into creating something that I could produce on my own. When I was in high school I used to hang out with SkateThing, the brain behind the whole of the Tokyo subculture scene and the man behind A Bathing Ape. He comes from an illustrator background and at his studio he had all kinds of tools and toys. He xeroxed his hand drawings and then scanned them in to desin on the computer. It's cut and copy in its original form. Watching his doing this made me want to do the same thing. He was one of the biggest influences I had and I owe him so much for whom I am today. Without him, I don't know if I would have been interested in things to do with design. We went to the same high school but that's not where I met him, as he is 6 years older than me. But I kinda knew him not because he was a legend at school, but from where he worked which was at the legendary skate/punk shop Violent Grind, in the underground district Shimokitazawa where I used to hang out. I got to know him actually by skating at the same spot and eventally we became good friends. SO I started to visit him after school, making collages and then silkscreening prints out of them. It cost roughly 100 dollars for one screen so we split the cost. There was an American daily wear import shop where you could get blank T-shirts at wholesale prices around the corner from the Stussy Ebisu chapter, where I worked part time back then. So after I finished up at work, I would go straight to his studio and screen print on to tthe T-shirts, and thosse were basically my first pieces of designed clothing. I used pictures of various supermodels from around that time like Christy Turlington; I pretty much cut and pasted those images. I was like, 'It's a piece of cake!' That was my first experience of making T-shirts. I was so excited to discover how eay it was. They looked like clothes sold at the store! I was so amped that I started to produce them and wore them with my friends and they became something like our team shirt, a uniform. SkateThing named the brand '40 Percent'. We were so proud of ourselves for being kinda visusal bootleggers and since he heard that if we only copy less than 40% from the original image, it woldn't violate the commercial rights law, so the name 40 Percent sounder perfect to represen who we were. We cut and copied images and phrases from everywhere. We didn't understand really what they meant most of the time, but if it sounded right, we sampled them. We also sampled lines from our favourite movies. Around the same tme, Tomo aka Nigo of A Bathing Ape started his first retail store called Nowhere and he decided to start caryying our line. It was around '93. Do you know the sone 93 'Til Infinity by Souls Of Mischief? It's one of my favourite tracks and explains som ch for me! SkateThing was doing all sorts of things back then, drawing and designing etc and I started to dream about doing something similar. 40 Percent did well at Nowhere. Nowhere started as an iport clothing store but quickly evolved into a place which carried doesmtic brands, such as the newborn A bathing Ape, Undercover, and 40 Percent. Soon after SkateThing suggested that I start my own line. He is the kind of guy who gets bored quickly when things start rolling, that's why I like him though. I started Neighborhood with my motorcycle mate Takishi, We knew nothing and had no experiecnce in making clothing. Our first products were of course printed T-shirts and hoodies,, just like 40 Percent. We only made what we wanted to wear. If we came across somehting that looked cool, we made the graphic and printed them and then sold them at the strore the next day. It was a time when everything started to boom in Harajuku. The explision of sales happened suddenly and I didn't really understand why things went so crazy in such a shirt period. I was just designing in the office and iddn't pay much attention to what was happening. When this Harajuku thing really started to heat up, I was scared. I didn't believe tha tmy products were worth that much. So to aviod the attention from the market, I decided to change the brand name from 40 Percent to W-Taps Visual Uparmored. The concept was to uparmor any viual graphic, but when I look back now, maybe it had another meaning - it somehow represented my subconscious way of being self-defensive. It was around 96, and the sales dropped soon after I changed the name of hte brand but that was a good opportunity for me to think serously about making real clothes. I started discussions with a pattern maker, researched textiles and learnt the process of prodction. I exhibited about 6 seasons of collections. But then I stopped in 2002 as I felt I wasn't capable of doing it anymore.
"Motorcycles and skateboards are my main cultural backbone and creative resource. My first bike was a Steed, Honda's version of a Harley Davidson - an American style bike with a laid back seat and a relatively long fork. Soon after, whilst I was in high school, I bought my first Harley, a Shovelhead, form Shinsuke Takizawa aka Takishin, my old friend who is the founder and designer of Neighborhood, parent compay of W-Taps. I think Harleys are the kind of bikes you can grow with. All American cars/motocycles are manufactured at the end of the 70s are like that. Manmade, no computer chip bullshit, you know? I learned that there is a saying in AMerica, 'Motorcycle Makes A Man'. I guess it means that men learn how to fx and work things out through building and maintaining a motorcycle. You definitely learn so much when owning a bike. You basically learn the process of how to find a problem and how to fix it. I love this way of thinking. As I said, any motorcylce or car made in the 70s, you can usually fix on your own 'cause they're analogue machines. My '79 Shovelhead is the first and only Harley that I've rebuilt from scratch. I mean, from head-totoe. I even placed the piston ring by myself. I've been riding this bike since I was in high school and I don't think I would ever consider letting this bike go and buying another. This is the bike I'll grow old with. The reason why I got into Harleys was because of my interest in B class biker movies from the 60s and 70s. My first love of American culture was with skateboarding and BMX, and then it somehow led me to bikes. Nowadays, it's pretty common to find ex-skaters who are into bikes. Riding Harley with Vans sneakers, Dickies etc. Back then there was nobody who was into both. I somehow got into them and am still doing it. For me, skatboarding is the creative use of terrain. Have you ever seen the famosu photo of the legend Julien Stranger ollie-ing over a crack in the ground after an earthquake in San Francisco? That's the essence of skateboarding you know? It's about working things out on your own and finding your own path. It's an abstract creation in a way. Motorcycles are a more direct and simple creation. Build things up. Very DIY. Ilearned the meaning of craftsmanship through motorcylces. Makin gthings with your own hands. I think that becaome the foundation for me. Maybe it's hard to see from my products because it's not obvious. It's more like my approach towards things. I've never learnt fashion formerly, I just learnt by doing. Just like I did with motorcycles. I don't know why I was so attracted to motorcycles and skateboards Maybe because they are considered as otsider cultre made by outcasts for outcasts. Skateboarding is neither a school activity nor a team sport. It's an individual expression, a ways of life. So too is the motorcycle. You ride your bike the way you want to, you don't have to deal with anything else. I was an outcast in school and all my friends were like that too. That made a huge impact on my developing tastes. Punk, skateboarding and motorcylces. As you know, my generation was so interested in American cultre, which was at the centre of everything bakc then. Movies, music and fashion. I was born and raised in Shibuya, the centre of Japanese youth culture so it was natural for me to get involved."
"Silkscreen printing was my first foray into creating something that I could produce on my own. When I was in high school I used to hang out with SkateThing, the brain behind the whole of the Tokyo subculture scene and the man behind A Bathing Ape. He comes from an illustrator background and at his studio he had all kinds of tools and toys. He xeroxed his hand drawings and then scanned them in to desin on the computer. It's cut and copy in its original form. Watching his doing this made me want to do the same thing. He was one of the biggest influences I had and I owe him so much for whom I am today. Without him, I don't know if I would have been interested in things to do with design. We went to the same high school but that's not where I met him, as he is 6 years older than me. But I kinda knew him not because he was a legend at school, but from where he worked which was at the legendary skate/punk shop Violent Grind, in the underground district Shimokitazawa where I used to hang out. I got to know him actually by skating at the same spot and eventally we became good friends. SO I started to visit him after school, making collages and then silkscreening prints out of them. It cost roughly 100 dollars for one screen so we split the cost. There was an American daily wear import shop where you could get blank T-shirts at wholesale prices around the corner from the Stussy Ebisu chapter, where I worked part time back then. So after I finished up at work, I would go straight to his studio and screen print on to tthe T-shirts, and thosse were basically my first pieces of designed clothing. I used pictures of various supermodels from around that time like Christy Turlington; I pretty much cut and pasted those images. I was like, 'It's a piece of cake!' That was my first experience of making T-shirts. I was so excited to discover how eay it was. They looked like clothes sold at the store! I was so amped that I started to produce them and wore them with my friends and they became something like our team shirt, a uniform. SkateThing named the brand '40 Percent'. We were so proud of ourselves for being kinda visusal bootleggers and since he heard that if we only copy less than 40% from the original image, it woldn't violate the commercial rights law, so the name 40 Percent sounder perfect to represen who we were. We cut and copied images and phrases from everywhere. We didn't understand really what they meant most of the time, but if it sounded right, we sampled them. We also sampled lines from our favourite movies. Around the same tme, Tomo aka Nigo of A Bathing Ape started his first retail store called Nowhere and he decided to start caryying our line. It was around '93. Do you know the sone 93 'Til Infinity by Souls Of Mischief? It's one of my favourite tracks and explains som ch for me! SkateThing was doing all sorts of things back then, drawing and designing etc and I started to dream about doing something similar. 40 Percent did well at Nowhere. Nowhere started as an iport clothing store but quickly evolved into a place which carried doesmtic brands, such as the newborn A bathing Ape, Undercover, and 40 Percent. Soon after SkateThing suggested that I start my own line. He is the kind of guy who gets bored quickly when things start rolling, that's why I like him though. I started Neighborhood with my motorcycle mate Takishi, We knew nothing and had no experiecnce in making clothing. Our first products were of course printed T-shirts and hoodies,, just like 40 Percent. We only made what we wanted to wear. If we came across somehting that looked cool, we made the graphic and printed them and then sold them at the strore the next day. It was a time when everything started to boom in Harajuku. The explision of sales happened suddenly and I didn't really understand why things went so crazy in such a shirt period. I was just designing in the office and iddn't pay much attention to what was happening. When this Harajuku thing really started to heat up, I was scared. I didn't believe tha tmy products were worth that much. So to aviod the attention from the market, I decided to change the brand name from 40 Percent to W-Taps Visual Uparmored. The concept was to uparmor any viual graphic, but when I look back now, maybe it had another meaning - it somehow represented my subconscious way of being self-defensive. It was around 96, and the sales dropped soon after I changed the name of hte brand but that was a good opportunity for me to think serously about making real clothes. I started discussions with a pattern maker, researched textiles and learnt the process of prodction. I exhibited about 6 seasons of collections. But then I stopped in 2002 as I felt I wasn't capable of doing it anymore.
from stilista.xanga.com
