Getting back to quality basics in The 6
Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo set to launch first store in Canada this week
The Toronto retail landscape is set to welcome yet another newsy import: Uniqlo will open its first Canadian outpost at the Eaton Centre on Friday.
The 27,400-square-foot flagship will feature a streetfront presence, its neat, minimalist red logo in English and Japanese characters a visual reprieve from the overload of Dundas Square. The two-floor shop will offer the chain’s full line of men’s, women’s and children’s clothing. A second store is set to follow at Yorkdale on Oct. 20.
Many shoppers will not have heard of the brand, says Uniqlo’s Canadian COO Yasuhiro Hayashi, who was in town earlier this summer to preview the fall collection.
“We feel we are not yet known by many shoppers,” says Hayashi, of the brand he describes as: “Ultimate basics. This is LifeWear.”
This last syllable is capitalized, as it is a much-employed brand tag line as well as its central philosophy. “We are not fast fashion, but we are affordable.”
To continue the brand lesson, we segue to a snippet of the LifeWear manifesto: “Many of us now prioritize emotional over material needs. We seek no more than what we believe is truly important . . . Wardrobes incorporating comfortable clothing for a wide range of occasions reflect the times in which we live.”
Judging by the much-ado and lineups back in 2014 when fellow Japanese retail phenomenon Muji housewares opened around the corner, Canadian consumers have an appetite for the kind of anti-consumerist ambiguity from the orderly land that also brought us the Marie Kondo movement, which teaches us to seek out only items that give us joy and purge the rest for a better life.
Uniqlo is built around quality basics, such as jeans, chinos, shirtdresses, cashmere sweaters and button-downs, which aspire to an apotheosis of simplicity and efficiency. But it also, antithetically, offers an abundance of possibilities. To wit, one of the first things you notice walking into a Uniqlo is the rainbow walls stacked like Pez containers with sweaters, socks, even multicoloured underwear.
Canadian-born Joe Fresh is now old-hat to us, but the brand clearly borrowed a few tricks from Uniqlo in terms of merchandising back when it started up.
Uniqlo was born in Hiroshima in 1984 (the store name is an elision of the original name “Unique Clothing,”) and now boasts more than 1,700 stores around the globe. Canada will become its 18th market.
Owned by Fast Retailing, which was founded by Tadashi Yanai, the richest man in Japan, the holding company is the fourth-largest fashion chain in the world, after Spain’s Zara, Sweden’s H&M and the American entry, Gap. Uniqlo eschews the knocked-straight-from-the-runway approach: In feel, it is most like what Gap used to be, back when its focus was firmly on basics.
The other thing that separates Uniqlo from the fast-fashion pack is its focus on sturdier construction and fabric innovation. The goal is “sim- plicity, quality and longevity,” says Hayashi of the ethos.
That means that Uniqlo relies on economies of scale to get the prices down. At launch in Canada, the chain’s celebrated cashmere sweaters clock in between $49.90 and $99.90 (for women, the options come in 16 colours for V-neck, 12 colours for crew neck styles; hot this fall are wine, teal, camel, cream, plus pops of mustard, orange and pink). T-shirts are $9.90 to $16.90; merino cardigans and sweaters are $39.90 to $69.90; jeans and pants start at $49.90; and the company’s highly regarded hi-tech underwear for all start at $9.90 a pack.
Hayashi touts the proprietary HeatTech (sweat wicking, heat retaining) and Ultra Light Down (packable) as being particularly applicable to the Canadian market.
“We hope consumers will respond to how light and how warm the parkas and jackets are,” he says. Indeed, the layering vests are especially clever. Uniqlo follows principles of industrial design to make the smallest number of stitches necessary to create a functional garment. Prices are low because design makes manufacturing more streamlined and Uniqlo can take advantage of economies of scale.
This functionality focus has attracted some unusual collaborators. The still-under-wraps Carine Roitfeld capsule collection debuts just after the Eaton Centre opening, on Oct. 4. The former French Vogue editor and style icon is revered for her tousled bedhead, thick-rim eyeliner and pencil skirt esthetic, so look for a jolt her goth-sexy secretary in the mix.
And Christophe Lemaire, another French designer who has headed up design, first at Lacoste, then most recently Hermes, was appointed this year as artistic director for a new Uniqlo research and development centre based in Paris. The fashionforward line designed there, Uniqlo U for both women and men, is still under wraps. But it is set to debut here on the day of the Toronto launch, which is the same day as it launches Tokyo and Paris, and a week ahead of the rest of the world.