Okay.

“Can you give me a nickname?”

Kapital creates its bandanna patterns through discharge printing, a screenprinting process in which a chemical reaction removes pigment from the fabric. Kapital’s collaboration with the Marley family resulted in a collection inspired by 1970s and ’80s Jamaica and Bob’s legendary discography.

“I wanted to create something for the next 100 years into the future.”

Kiro's father, Mr. Hirata, is the family's original denim-head. While on a trip to the U.S. as a karate instructor in the 1980s, he was introduced to American jeans and vintage clothing. So when he returned to Kojima, his wife's hometown, he opened a denim factory—Capital Ltd.—and later a vintage store. Eventually that became the launch point for Kapital. As a kid growing up in Okayama, Kiro didn't see himself joining the family business. He wanted out. So at 19 he went to the U.S. to paint and study art. But there, as his father did, he found a passion for vintage clothing and denim.

When he arrived back in Japan, he went to work for 45R, another high-end Japanese denim brand but with a slightly more refined, traditional approach. In 2002, Kiro left 45R to finally go work for his father, and that's when, deliberately or not, they arrived at the magic formula, applying his art-minded design sensibility to his father's reverence for traditional craftsmanship. That was when Kapital emerged.

Japan is renowned for denim, but mostly historically accurate replicas of old American jeans, made by weaving, dyeing, and stitching denim exactly as brands like Levi's and Lee have done since the 19th century. Kapital takes an avant-garde approach to that tradition, adding new layers to complicate it. One example of this is Kiro's invention of heavy-duty tweed-like Century Denim, which is dyed using persimmon juice and gives jeans a sculptural quality, making them stiff enough to stand up on their own. “Looking back at the history of jeans, the oldest jeans from Levi's are about 100 years old,” Kiro has said. “Jeans originated in the USA, and my father perfectly mastered the reproduction. So I thought it was my turn to create something new and not just repeat what has already been done. I wanted to create something for the next 100 years into the future.”

The Soho store, located in the company’s headquarters. The Kojima store, built by hand by the Hirata family with help from local craftspeople. The Blue Hands store, situated in a traditional Japanese home.

Kiro is singularly obsessed with history, with making something resistant to time. And he thinks that since I'm a writer, I should be able to give him a nickname, a way for the world to understand and remember him with just a couple of words.

I offer the first thing that comes to mind. How about Smiley? Seems to fit the man and the brand. But he doesn't like it; too goofy. Plus he doesn't want Kapital to be known as the smiley-face brand. The brand's motifs also include peace signs, pot leaves, and roses, but never in quite the way you expect them. A Kapital collection plays like a greatest-hits compilation of hippie-dippie Americana, distorted, asymmetric, and exaggerated, as if dosed with Timothy Leary's finest psychedelics. All of the classic archetypes of the era are there: the war vet, the biker, the reggae singer, the rock star, the preppy, the athlete, the surfer… They're all on the same drugs, and they all somehow landed in Japan, where their clothes were bathed in vats of indigo, shibori dyed, intricately embroidered and reconstructed, boro-style, into wild East-meets-West mash-ups.

Kana describes this “culture clash” as being quintessential to Kapital, explaining how the source material for many of the pieces in the collection come from America but they are made using Japanese techniques and fabrics for a more interesting result. Styles are mixed and matched: A bomber jacket becomes a kimono; sweatpants are dyed and patched like ancient textiles. In some cases, as with tie-dyeing, which is considered to be a typical vintage hippie craft, and Japanese shibori dyeing, which dates back as far as the eighth century, the connection is even more direct.

Then there are the Kapital pieces that seem to have no original source material other than Kiro's own unique imagination. I encountered one such piece at the Kapital store in Kyoto, a wool intarsia sweater with an orange body, black stripes, and a white “belly” on the torso under the arms. The coolest version I've seen—and a totally bizarre example—of the recent craze for animal prints in menswear. And that's when a nickname hit me.…