The Ones That Got Away is a series by Rob Nowill examining brilliant and now sadly obsolete menswear brands.

A confession: I’ve never really understood the obsession with Japanese fashion.

Sure, I get Comme and Junya, and I can appreciate the older stuff by Issey and Yohji. But most of it leaves me cold. It’s not so much the clothes themselves, which are often perfectly pleasant. It’s the people who wear them.

There’s a kind of smug piousness to Western people who insist that they only wear Japanese denim, or who wouldn’t dream of wearing trainers unless they are by Hender Scheme. It’s the same kind of person who only drinks craft beer, or insists on playing entire albums instead of just putting on a playlist. Get them talking about Visvim and you’ve lost an hour of your life.

Ganryu, though, I liked. As one of the younger designers developed under the umbrella of Comme des Garçons, Fumito Ganryu emerged in 2007 as a former pattern-cutter and protégé of Rei Kawakubo. With her backing, he launched his own line, following in the footsteps talents like Chitose Abe of Sacai and Tao Kurihara (whose label also went too soon). But of the other brands in its stable, it was probably closer to the work of Junya Watanabe. Both seemed to take a certain pleasure in taking the most prosaic items of clothing – denim jeans, coach jackets, hoodies – and making them look the same, yet different.

It could be an unexpected seam, distorting the line of a pair of trousers. Or the scooped collar on baseball t-shirt. Or a fluorescent collar on an otherwise unremarkable jacket. Even if it sometimes veered into the extreme, you were guaranteed that no item was boring. Its aesthetic was a kind of mash-up between American sportswear and Japanese deconstruction, created with a gleeful colour sense: seafoam green, cornflower blue, and safety orange all bumping up against one another.