Japanese label Tatras keen to be big in Europe
As an off-calendar event during Paris Fashion Week, Japanese label Tatras, led by designer Masanaka Sakao, staged its first international show at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on June 22. It was a spectacular event in three acts.
Sakao’s men's fashion blends streetwear, military influences and a laid-back Californian mood. The show opened on a skateboarding ramp, a reference to one of Tatras’s style staples since 2012, and featured a series of skateboarding stars picked by Steve Berra, founder of The Berrics, a benchmark name in skate culture. Tatras teamed up with Barra to produce the Tatras X The Berrics capsule collection.
Beneath giant screens broadcasting images of Californian palms to an ear-splitting hard rock soundtrack, the Tatras extravaganza continued with a catwalk show, featuring the label's distinctive brand of uber-casual streetwear, big on Japanese nylon outfits in soft, delicate hues like beige, sage green and coral red, mixed with technical apparel of vintage and military inspiration, with a handful of flowing back urban looks and a series of printed items, the result of a collaboration with British artist Nick Walter.
In the third and final act, the giant screens broadcast loud and clear Sakao’s philosophy, “I don’t like popularity based on lies, my dream has always been to have a reputation based on truth,” ending the first Tatras menswear show in Paris on a conceptual note.
Tatras operates in Japan and Italy, and from its inception its trademark has been “a combination of Japanese style and cuts with first-class Italian fabrics.” The label first caught the fashion world’s eye with a collection of down jackets in Polish goose feathers. Tatras was bought by Japanese group Yagi & Co. in 2014, and since then it has expanded its range, developing the label in Japan and Italy and keeping a production site in Poland.
The label operates four monobrand stores (two in Tokyo, one each in Osaka and Milan), with a new opening scheduled in Tokyo for late 2019. And it is distributed via 350 multibrand retailers worldwide (120 in Japan). It is now keen to accelerate its expansion in Europe. “The European market is clearly one of our targets, and we will boost our presence there next winter with a down jacket collection, followed by a men’s and women’s ready-to-wear line,” said Angelo D’Arcangelo, marketing and commercial director.
The label recently hired an agent in Paris and it will run a retail corner at the Galeries Lafayette department store from November.
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