Hiroki Nakamura. Designer of the cult label Visvim. Famously elusive, but also famous in fashion circles for making clothes with the same emotional remainder, that lingering inchoate magic, that a museum-caliber work of art has. He resided in the zone I wanted to enter, where clothes were more than clothes. I’d admired his designs for years, while never being able to afford even a single item. The fringed moccasin sneakers he’d become known for; the denim jackets, hand-finished, heavy with aura; one-of-a-kind painted shirts; sturdy, ancient-looking pants. Hiroki’s inspirations were old workwear, the turquoise and silver of the American Southwest, and the insane levels of artisanship he’d seen growing up in Japan—indigo dyers, silk-weavers, people who had been glazing porcelain for hundreds of years. He’d once worked at a snowboarding company, Burton, which gave him a technical savvy. But in 2001, at age 29, he’d left to start Visvim. His clothes are prohibitively expensive—flannels that cost $975, unstructured jackets that cost twice that—and coveted by the likes of John Mayer and Kanye West. Hiroki’s pieces have the feel of artifacts—of rare materials meeting rare craftsmanship but coming together in familiar forms, like jeans or parkas. They look like they were hand-sculpted after being dug out of the earth in some faraway desert. They have power.

In the few interviews I could find, he was slightly…gnomic. A man of relatively few words. But the things he designed looked reassuring. Like they’d fought off demons and won. I thought maybe he’d have some advice on doing just that.

Shortly before Memorial Day, Amanda and I flew back to New York and drove north into the Catskills to get married. My mother wore a wig to approximate the hair she’d lost, and walked me down the aisle. By this point, she was hollowed out from chemotherapy, but her doctors were optimistic—the same drugs that were annihilating her were annihilating her cancer. She was going to live. For our wedding, she’d skipped her weekly chemo session so that she’d have the energy to dance. She danced! And for a moment, everything went calm and quiet.

Hiroki has an aversion to things that are too perfect: “Because everything is made by machine, everything is perfect—it’s boring. It’s uncomfortable, almost.”

In June, she had surgery—they took her ovaries, both breasts. My father told me he dreaded the moment after the stitches came out, when the reality of what she’d lost would set in for her. After the surgery, I flew to Philadelphia, and we took walks around the block—once a day, and then twice, and then practically every hour. You cannot keep my mother on a couch. By the fall, she was nearly herself again. Her hair had begun to grow back; she got her first haircut in months. She had gone through hell and came out looking like Jean Seberg in Breathless. It was the most miraculous thing. On the phone, I told her how I’d been coping, and asked if she might mind if I went further, maybe even documented whatever weird quest I was on. She admitted that she’d noticed that my clothes had gotten increasingly…whimsical. If I wanted to write about that—about her—she was okay with that.

I reached out to Hiroki. It wasn’t easy—he is, by design, difficult to find. He’s always on an airplane, or on a road trip without his phone, or meeting with the planet’s one armadillo-skin harvester in an undisclosed location. Finally, a few weeks after the election, I heard back. He was amenable to the idea of playing therapist, of attempting to dispense some emotional and/or sartorial advice. He asked if we might meet in January, in Paris.

Visvim, at its best, re-centers reality around its own peculiar values—it drapes you in magic. Behold, for instance, the jacket Hiroki was wearing when we first met. It was…tweedy. Reddish. It looked like a cape, but also a kimono. He said the garment was inspired by both shapes, and by the Ainu, the ancient indigenous people of Japan and Russia. He grinned, held up his right arm, shook his voluminous sleeve. The sound of keys hitting wallet hitting cell phone—the sound of a pocket!—rang out. He’d put the pocket in the sleeve. An actual magician’s garment, full of magician’s tricks.

We were in his Paris showroom on a Friday morning. It was men’s Fashion Week there, and Inauguration Day back in America—every time I remembered this fact, I felt dread. We were surrounded by things he’d made. He showed me a brown shearling coat, its surface shiny with lacquer, and then a natural leather jacket in a vivid purple-red. The color, he explained, came from massaging persimmon jam into the leather. I want to say that again: He was rubbing jackets with jam.

Eventually we sat down in a side room, where he told me his story. He was born in 1971. Grew up in Kofu, Japan. His parents owned a factory. He was a teenager in Japan right as the craze for American workwear set in among the country’s youth. “All of my friends were into Americana,” he said. He started collecting vintage denim and shoes. “And I started having a realization: Some vintage boots I really like, and some I don’t.” Where was that feeling coming from in one piece and not in another? he asked himself. “What’s the difference? It’s the same company. Why do I like this more than this? I was always curious about that.” He began making a list for each item of clothing, trying to figure out which qualities he was drawn to.

This Pennsylvania Dad Is a Style Legend and Visvim God Meet this low-key Instagram style hero with an insane collection of Nike, Visvim, and custom Native American–inspired moccasins.

Hiroki likes to tell a story about a Tibetan robe he found in Nepal. Sort of Visvim’s Rosetta stone, like my clown pants, the object that unlocks the whole story. The robe was sitting in the corner of an antiques shop. Hiroki found himself drawn to it. He said to himself: “That’s so powerful, I don’t know what that is.” He saw the color first: “Reddish, deep, burgundy, really rich.” Then he opened it. “Inside is all indigo.” He had that feeling—that rush of discovery. “I put it on.… I am super cool.” He could walk down the street and feel invincible. The robe put him in the world more; there was no doubting his presence with it on. It is a feeling he’s been chasing ever since. “I have to ask myself: Why am I so excited about this? That’s where my design process comes from.”

He is fond of the word character, the way an object can express individuality, experience, life force. He has an aversion to things that are too perfect: “Because everything is made by machine, everything is perfect—it’s boring. It’s uncomfortable, almost. Even being in a new car, for me, I get carsick. Because it’s sealed perfectly, there’s no air movement. Just being in skyscrapers, for me, I feel like a little gecko put into a glass box or something, you know? I can’t breathe anymore.” He was trying, he realized, to make imperfect things you could breathe in.

He began seeking out artisans. Mud dyers, reindeer-hide shapers in Lapland, spinners of rare Sea Island cotton. He used pits in the ground full of live bacteria. Hand-dyed yarn. Ancient Frenchwomen who crochet. Industrial washers to shrink denim in precise 35 percent increments.

At first, Visvim was a cult thing—exotic, mysterious. I remember seeing it years ago, albeit rarely, in certain shops—a few embroidered shirts, weathered pants with quiet force, bearing price tags too substantial to reckon with, like postcards from some improbable, faraway place.

I’d heard Eric Clapton was a collector. I wrote him to ask what he saw in Visvim. It was a whim, basically; I did not expect a reply. To my surprise, he wrote back immediately:

I see Hiroki as an anthropologist, a folklorist who finds the thread that weaves all of our different cultures together, a perfectionist who understands the importance of pure design, form following function…

I have the honour to know him as a friend, and fellow traveller, we met through another pilgrim; Hiroshi Fujiwara, a great designer himself and the founder of Goodenough and Fragment…

Over the last seventeen years I have bought almost everything Hiroki has made, sometimes several times over. I humbly regard him as the first designer in the world today…

I have probably the largest collection of Visvim artefacts in the world, matched only perhaps by John Mayer, who continually beats me to the punch…

I literally cannot wear anything else (other than custom Loro Piana)…

Eric C

Visvim’s Hiroki Nakamura, whose clothes feel like treasures brought back from daring missions. Noam Galai

We were strangers to each other but I quickly laid it out for Hiroki, the reason I’d come. The rootlessness, formlessness of Los Angeles. My mother on the mend, my family trying to make sense of the void we’d all just glimpsed. My new wife and I, trying to learn how to be good to each other. Our new president, hours away from the oath of office. The foreboding everyone I knew felt. The sense of powerlessness. How do we take care of ourselves when the world won’t take care of us? You could already tell we were entering a year of psychic trauma, and I wanted to hear that there were things I could do to mitigate that, things I could wear to increase my resolve.

Hiroki said he understood. The way who you are seems to interact in some deeper way with what you wear, how one influences the other. He’d built an entire life around that idea. He and his wife and their daughter live in Los Angeles, too, for much of the year. They split their time between Japan and California, he said. They live not far from me, it turned out, and were relative newcomers as well, drawn to the “free feeling” of the place, as Hiroki put it.