Julius
Tatsuro Horikawa was born in 1972 in Hokkaido and came to fashion through the back door, which is perhaps the only entrance that makes sense for a designer whose work has always existed at the margins of the industry. He studied at Vantan Design Institute in Tokyo and worked as a graphic designer, producing visuals for DJ performances in Tokyo’s underground music scene — a milieu where the boundaries between art, sound, and clothing were porous and where the aesthetic of darkness was not a marketing category but a lived condition. In 1996, he founded Third Stone as a graphic design practice, and in 1997 he launched nuke, a clothing label whose name suggested its ambitions more accurately than any mission statement could. When nuke ended in 2001, Horikawa reconceived the project as Julius — named for July, his birth month — and established it initially as an art project encompassing four forms of expression: clothing, video, graphics, and music. It was only in 2004 that Julius relaunched specifically as a fashion label, and the delay was significant. Horikawa needed three years to determine what kind of designer he was, and the answer — that clothing was one medium among several, all serving the same vision of beauty through deterioration — shaped everything that followed.
The first runway presentation came at Tokyo Collection for Spring/Summer 2005, and the first Paris Fashion Week showing on June 26, 2008, for the Spring/Summer 2009 season. The collections established a vocabulary that has remained remarkably consistent for two decades: monochromatic palettes restricted almost exclusively to black and grey, which Horikawa has described as symbols of madness and pain respectively; architectural draping that treats fabric as a structural material rather than a decorative one; asymmetric cuts and exaggerated internal seams that expose the mechanics of construction; and a pervasive sense of intentional deterioration — torn knees, hanging threads, garment-dyed and washed treatments — that suggests the clothes have survived something before arriving on the body. Horikawa has stated that he desires his garments to be worn down and destroyed through use, to achieve through actual living the quality of ruined beauty that he builds into them at the studio. It is an unusual position for a designer to take — that the garment improves as it degrades — but it is philosophically coherent with everything Julius represents.
The materials shift with the seasons. Spring and summer collections favor silk as a primary element, lending even the darkest garments a quality of translucence and movement. Fall and winter bring cowhide and lamb leather, which Horikawa regards as possessing an ancient utility and adaptability that makes it fundamentally his first choice for colder months. The construction techniques — brilliantly executed imperfection, as one commentator described them — position Julius within the dark avant-garde movement alongside Carol Christian Poell, whose pioneering work in object-dyed, conceptually rigorous menswear opened the space that designers like Horikawa subsequently occupied. The relationship to Rick Owens is more lateral: both deploy draped layers, asymmetric cuts, and monochromatic palettes, but Julius operates at a lower price point with cottons and more accessible leathers rather than the luxury fabrications that define Owens’s output. This accessibility — relative, always relative within the avant-garde — has given Julius among the highest number of overseas retail accounts of any Japanese menswear brand, with stockists at SSENSE, Dover Street Market locations worldwide, and specialty boutiques across Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto.
In 2008, Horikawa launched MA_Julius, a diffusion line offering simpler, more androgynous pieces at comparable quality to the mainline. The sub-label ran until Fall/Winter 2015, and its discontinuation has left a gap that the brand’s following continues to lament. In September 2020, Julius introduced the Permanent Line — a revival of iconic pieces including the Gas Mask Cargo Pants, Tailored Jacket, and Leather Jacket — an acknowledgment that certain garments had transcended their seasonal origins to become permanent fixtures in the wardrobes of the brand’s most committed customers. The gesture was characteristic: Horikawa builds clothes for people who wear them until they fall apart, and making those garments permanently available was simply a recognition of how his audience actually lives.
Julius exists in a particular zone of Japanese fashion — distinct from the conceptual pyrotechnics of Comme des Garçons, the subcultural channeling of Undercover, and the streetwear-luxury hybridism of the Ura-Harajuku lineage. It belongs instead to a darker, more inward-looking tradition that treats the body not as a vehicle for self-expression but as a site of endurance, and clothing not as identity but as protection. Horikawa’s contribution to this tradition is the insistence that decay is not the opposite of beauty but its purest form — that a garment at its most destroyed is a garment at its most honest. Twenty years into the project, the argument has not changed because it did not need to.