Uniqlo: Luxury To All the People?

The T-shirt is white, soft as whipped cream, as plain and simple as if it were poured across the body - but also as high tech as Uniqlo's HeatTech. It is on sale at for ¥790 in Japan in Uniqlo's Ginza store, $12.90 in New York's Fifth Avenue and £9.90 on London's Regent Street. As I was swept up the tower that holds the Japanese Fast Retailing headquarters in Tokyo I had time on arrival to read the company's core messages framed in silver on the walls. "Go beyond borders" read one, followed by "Global is local and local is global", "No challenge — no future" and — even more dramatically - "Change or die".

I was just starting to read the corporate philosophy — “To create truly great clothing with new and unique value, and to enable people all over the world to experience the joy, happiness and satisfaction of wearing such great clothes" — when I was ushered in to see Tadashi Yanai, billionaire founder of Uniqlo and chairman, president and CEO of its parent company, Fast Retailing.As you might expect from a man who has changed fundamentally the concept of fashion, designing for all of the people all of the time, Uniqlo's chief came from a basic background.

"I was born to the son of a retailer — in my generation we sold casual clothes - quintessential dailywear with the slogan ‘Made for all’," said Mr Yanai, through an interpreter, as we sat at a table in the large boardroom, where my eye was caught by a picture of a crowded Fifth Avenue filled with all the men wearing hats. 

"There is a change — once, people chose expensive or inexpensive, they were not confined to one brand," said the executive. "Everything depended on social class. Now there is much more liberty - not like 1947, with all those people in New York in suits and hats." 

The executive explained how, without a tradition of clothing in Japan, where everything had been based on the kimono, his clothing concept was “LifeWear: affordable, comfortable, everyday, fashionable, high-quality" - to put its characteristics in alphabetical order. With its first store founded 31 years ago in 1984, Uniqlo went on to develop this new category of apparel, inventing new materials, too, and refining the simple designs.

But not everything went quite as smoothly as the soft-surface T-shirts. It soon seemed smart to look beyond Uniqlo's Japanese birth country and to open stores in England.  "At the beginning it failed miserably," said Mr Yanai, admitting that the unknown brand could not capture clients in Britain and that the development process had to be completely withdrawn. 

I thought how unlikely it would be for a fashion executive in Europe or America to speak so openly about this humiliating failure - especially considering that Uniqlo is the largest apparel company in Japan,71 with a 6.5 per cent share of the market and annual sales of over ¥780.1 billion (£4.2 billion). Mr Yanai went on to describe the company's definition of LifeWear — making the simplest clothes to the highest possible standard for a basic price — epitomised by the white T-shirts that design director Yuki Katsuta had been showing me earlier. "Luxury to all the people" was the company mantra.

But is this possible? Isn't the definition of “luxury" something that goes beyond the norm? I had been listening to Mr Katsuta's words and they were still ringing in my ears: "We try to make it simple with just a small detail and think how people can use and wear our clothes as part of their style," the vice president of global research and design had said. "But how to find that trend of newness?" He had continued. "That is our challenge. Let me use as an example an Eames chair — designed 50-60 years ago. If only we can do the same thing with our white T-shirt."

Mr Katsuta might have trumpeted also the Uniqlo ultra-light down jackets, which can be anything from a slim vest to a man-sized coat. Of all the cheap and cheerful Main Street stores that have insinuated themselves into the fashion arena, Uniqlo is the only one to have built a reputation as a brand aiming for modern, functional design based on simplicity — although perhaps Cos, part of the Swedish based H&M group, is now mounting a mild challenge. Fast Retailing owns other companies with a streamlined approach, including Comptoir des Cotonniers and Helmut Lang.

But I had always felt that Uniqlo's strength was that it did not try to emulate designer looks, as H&M has done since it first produced a capsule collection designed by Karl Lagerfeld in 2004 and subsequently had many other collaborations, including Alber Elbaz in 2010 when he was at Lanvin to, most recently, Balmain's Instagram star Olivier Rousteing.

If I had thought that Uniqlo had kept itself aloof from high fashion, Mr Yanai soon put me right: it was his company's collaboration with Jil Sander from 2009 to 2011 with her +J "Luxury to all People" line which had founded a new brand identity.

"Jil Sander was not meant to be just a brand ambassador or just a professional, she never, ever compromised — that was her attitude," said Mr Yanai. And, indeed, I have a personal memory of visiting Jil Sander in her Hamburg home when she told me how hard she was working on the Uniqlo project, visiting the factories in China and pushing for perfection, even at basic prices.

Although he did not express it in such words, I felt that the relationship with Jil Sander had encouraged Mr Yanai to bring in other designers to enrich Uniqlo's philosophy of basics. "Any clothing requires an element of design," said the executive, referring to Uniqlo's embrace of Christophe Lemaire, formerly with Hermès and Lacoste. And a collaboration with Ines de la Fressange, who came on board because she had enthused about Uniqlo in her 2011 Paris handbook. "She chose us as a partner — she wrote in her book that we were her favourite brand," said Mr Yanai, describing the "discriminating and observing eyes" of the quintessentially Parisian Ines.

The latest style guru is the equally Parisian Carine Roitfeld, former French editor, founder of her own magazine and overall style maven. Her Uniqlo winter wardrobe was an instant sell-out — even with a faux leopard coat selling at €149.90, cashmere sweater at €99.90 and fancy hose at €7.90. However expensive this collection was by the company's standard (and how cheap by luxury brands'), the clothes had all the panache of a woman more usually dressed by Chanel or Givenchy.