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Setchu is a Milan-based luxury fashion label founded in 2020 by Japanese designer Satoshi Kuwata, whose work brings together Japanese ideas of form, restraint and utility with the exacting traditions of Western tailoring. The brand is best known for gender-inclusive clothing that folds, fastens, adapts and sometimes changes function altogether, transforming familiar wardrobe pieces through an unusually considered approach to construction. Its name comes from the Japanese expression wayo setchu (和洋折衷): wayo denotes Japan and the West, while setchu conveys the idea of compromise or blending. It is an unusually precise name for a fashion house whose identity has been built around finding equilibrium between different cultures rather than allowing one to dominate the other.
Born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1983, Satoshi Kuwata developed his understanding of clothing long before establishing a label of his own. Fashion was present in his family through an aunt who worked as a designer, while his formative years in Japan gave him an early appreciation of making, materials and the visual discipline of Japanese design. After finishing school, he worked at Beams, where exposure to menswear and classical tailoring helped sharpen an interest that would eventually take him to London.
Kuwata moved to London at 21 with a particular fascination for Savile Row. He went on to work at H. Huntsman & Sons, absorbing an approach to tailoring in which fabric is not simply draped around a figure but carefully engineered into shape. At the same time, he studied BA Womenswear at Central Saint Martins, placing the experimental culture of one of fashion’s most influential schools beside the discipline of traditional British bespoke tailoring.
Those two worlds would become fundamental to Setchu. Savile Row supplied an understanding of proportion, internal construction and precision; Central Saint Martins encouraged the development of an individual visual language. Kuwata later returned to the school to share his experience with students by teaching portfolio development, an episode he associated with the Japanese principle of ongaeshi, repaying kindness received from others.
His professional career continued across several very different parts of the international fashion industry. Official biographies and UAL records document experience with Gareth Pugh, Kanye West, Givenchy and Edun, where he became Director of Womenswear Design in 2013. His wider career also took him through New York, Paris and Milan and included senior creative experience before Setchu was established. What emerged from those years was not allegiance to a single fashion system but familiarity with couture-level craft, independent design, corporate fashion and commercially minded product development.
Setchu’s identity is more specific than the familiar fashion shorthand of “East meets West.” The brand itself uses Seibien in Aomori Prefecture as an architectural illustration of wayo setchu. The building combines a Japanese tatami-floored ground level with Western-influenced architecture above it. Two visual languages remain recognisable, yet together they create a third identity.
Kuwata applies a comparable principle to clothing. A blazer may carry the discipline of British tailoring while behaving with the flatness and flexibility associated with Japanese garment construction. A coat can begin as a recognisable Western archetype but be interrupted by folds, ties or detachable sections. Squares, rectangles and flat planes repeatedly become three-dimensional once placed around the body.
Setchu consequently treats clothing less as a fixed object than as something the wearer completes. The official brand philosophy places particular emphasis on unisex design and interchangeability, while Kuwata has repeatedly described “playful functionality” as central to his work. That functionality is rarely purely utilitarian. It creates an element of discovery: a fastening moves, a section folds back, a jacket packs into an unexpectedly small space, or one garment assumes another role.
Perhaps no piece communicates this philosophy more clearly than the Origami Jacket. Setchu’s best-known version is constructed from lightweight, pre-creased wool and designed to fold neatly for travel before returning to its tailored shape. Its usefulness is inseparable from its appearance: the same pressed geometry that allows the jacket to pack flat becomes part of its visual character.
This principle runs throughout Kuwata’s design vocabulary. Knitwear can change configuration through fastening; outerwear can separate into different pieces; shirts and jackets are conceived around folds that allow new proportions to emerge. Traditional garment categories become starting points rather than rules.
It also explains why Setchu works across gender boundaries so naturally. Rather than creating a menswear version and a womenswear version of the same idea, the brand often begins with the architecture of the garment itself and considers how different bodies can inhabit it. Setchu’s own description of its DNA identifies “unisex and interchangeability between the genders” as a central focus.
Kuwata has also extended this thinking into bespoke tailoring. In 2024, Setchu collaborated with historic Savile Row tailor Davies & Son on a small capsule of bespoke pieces, bringing Kuwata back to the tailoring culture that had helped shape his early career. The project was presented in Venice around the Biennale and combined traditional bespoke workmanship with Setchu’s foldable, adaptable approach to tailoring.
Setchu’s interest in longevity does not stop at silhouette. Material development has increasingly become part of the design process.
For Fall 2024, Kuwata introduced an unusually light paper-denim textile produced in Japan. Vogue reported that the material combined paper fibre with sugarcane- and cotton-derived yarns, producing a smooth denim-like fabric significantly lighter than conventional denim. In a separate interview with Vogue Hong Kong, Kuwata explained that his team had explored converting discarded sugarcane by-products into paper that could then be spun and blended into yarn.
The same period brought the development of machine-washable cashmere, intended to make a traditionally delicate luxury fibre easier to live with. The significance of both fabrics lies in the way Setchu approaches innovation: not as novelty for its own sake, but as a response to how a garment will actually be worn, packed, washed and kept.
That attitude sits naturally beside the Japanese concept of mottainai, which Setchu cites in its sustainability philosophy. The word expresses regret at waste and has become associated with reducing, reusing and making considered use of resources. For Setchu, one response is to design a garment that can do more than one job, making usefulness and longevity part of the aesthetic itself.
Recognition arrived quickly.
In July 2022, Setchu placed first in the eighteenth edition of Who Is on Next?, the Italian talent-scouting initiative associated with Vogue Italia, Altaroma, Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and Pitti Immagine. The result brought Kuwata the Premio Franca Sozzani and increased visibility within Italian fashion.
In 2023, Setchu was selected as one of the recipients of the CNMI Fashion Trust Grant. Camera Moda Fashion Trust records show that Setchu, Niccolò Pasqualetti and Marcello Pipitone each received €40,000, together with access to business mentoring and strategic consultation through the Trust’s network.
The decisive international milestone followed in June 2023. From a field of more than 2,400 applicants, Kuwata reached the final of the tenth LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers and won its principal award. The prize brought Setchu €400,000 and a year of mentorship within the LVMH group.
The award did more than confer prestige. It gave the young house greater international visibility at precisely the moment its vocabulary technical tailoring, genderless dressing, restrained luxury and transformability was becoming increasingly legible as a coherent brand identity.
Setchu reached another important threshold in January 2025 when Pitti Immagine invited Kuwata to Florence as Guest Designer for Pitti Uomo 107.
Instead of choosing a conventional runway setting, he presented Fall/Winter 2025-26 inside the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. It was Setchu’s first full-scale fashion show before a live audience, accompanied by an exhibition that placed garments and objects among the library’s historic collections.
The collection carried the leitmotif “I WANT LESS, AND LESS THAN THAT.” Across 40 looks, Kuwata returned to one of his most persistent questions: how much can a garment do without becoming visually overloaded? Tailoring could fold, shorten or change proportion; masculine and feminine wardrobes moved into one another; and pieces made with Davies & Son brought Savile Row directly into the conversation.
The Florence presentation made clear that Setchu’s minimalism is not about removing craft. Quite the opposite: complexity is often hidden inside apparently quiet clothes.
Travel and particularly Kuwata’s passion for fishing has increasingly become a source of firsthand research.
For Spring/Summer 2026, a journey to Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls led to a collaboration involving LVMH Métiers d’Art, the Jafuta Foundation and Batoka artisans. Local women’s palm-frond weaving informed sculptural objects incorporated into the collection as skirts, tops and layered forms.
Kuwata linked those handwoven structures with Setchu’s own interest in free-form construction, while the ready-to-wear continued his pursuit of adaptable travel clothing. A hybrid hoodie-shirt could be unzipped into a lightweight scarf; a safari parka incorporated handles that allowed it to be carried as a tote; and a koi-decorated garment bag could be drawn around the body and worn as a tunic.
The collection demonstrated an increasingly expansive definition of Setchu. Cultural exchange was no longer expressed only between Japan and Europe but also through encounters with craft traditions during Kuwata’s travels.
Fall/Winter 2026 began with another fishing journey, this time to Greenland. Kuwata visited the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk, where traditional Inuit clothing and the ingenuity of garments made for severe conditions prompted him to rethink outerwear construction.
The resulting collection introduced armhole and shoulder shapes drawn inward toward the chest, reflecting both the anatomy of protective clothing and the instinctive posture of a body bracing against cold. Yet even substantial outerwear retained Setchu’s familiar transformability. During the presentation at the brand’s new Milan headquarters, padded pieces were folded and zipped through different configurations, including clothing and bag forms.
It was an instructive development in Kuwata’s work: tailoring was still the foundation, but tailoring was being treated as a system that could respond to movement, climate and changing use.
Setchu’s most recent collection as of July 2026 continued the dialogue between travel, fishing and construction.
For Spring/Summer 2027, a journey to Gabon led Kuwata to focus on fishing nets not simply for their appearance but for the relationship between strength, openness and structure. Multicoloured leather cords were hand-tied over suits and shirtdresses using a Japanese square-knot technique, turning the net into a layer of both decoration and engineering.
The collection was notably concise and heavily handmade. Circular elements entered a design language normally dominated by squares and rectangles, while softer dresses extended Setchu’s exploration of femininity. Even a rigid tatami-constructed biker jacket was reconsidered through function: zipped detachable sleeves allowed it to become a waistcoat.
Rather than broadening into endless categories, Kuwata described the direction in terms of going deeper, a revealing phrase for a house that increasingly develops ideas across seasons instead of abandoning them after a single collection.
Setchu’s world expanded beyond clothing in September 2025 when Kuwata unveiled SETCHU PERFUME at Pitti Fragranze in Florence.
Created with perfumer Julie Massé of MANE, the debut comprised five fragrances and translated the brand’s familiar dialogue between Japanese and Western references into scent. The collection includes Monday 9AM Genmaicha, Wednesday 5PM Yuzu, Thursday 1PM Ayu, Friday 2AM Tatami and Saturday 8AM Hinoki Buro names built around times, rituals, materials and sensory memories.
Fragrance feels less like a departure for Setchu than an extension of Kuwata’s broader interest in objects, rituals and everyday experience. Fashion remains the centre of the house, but the perfume project suggests that wayo setchu can operate as a wider creative philosophy rather than merely a method of cutting clothes.
Setchu’s rise has been remarkably measured considering the attention surrounding its LVMH Prize victory. By early 2025, Vogue Business reported that the brand had reached approximately 45 stockists, while Kuwata continued to speak about development in terms of quality, continuity and controlled growth rather than sheer scale. Le Monde reported in late 2024 that Kuwata remained the sole owner of the house.
That independence helps explain the unusual consistency of Setchu’s design system. The Origami Jacket does not disappear because another season has arrived. A technique first used for a coat can return later in a shirt, bag or tailored suit. Materials are refined; existing ideas are reconsidered; new functions are added.
It is a slower method of building a fashion vocabulary, but one particularly well suited to Kuwata’s philosophy.
Setchu’s importance within contemporary fashion lies not simply in the fact that it combines Japanese and Western references. Many designers work between cultures. What distinguishes Satoshi Kuwata is the precision with which that exchange has been turned into a working design system.
Japanese flat construction meets Savile Row sculpture. Origami becomes a packing solution. Luxury fabric is asked to survive travel. A blazer becomes less fixed, a bag becomes wearable, a familiar coat reveals a second life. Craft and practicality are not treated as opposites.
That is ultimately what setchu means within the house Kuwata has built: not the dilution of two traditions into something neutral, but the careful negotiation between them until a new object becomes possible.
From a Milan studio founded in 2020 to the LVMH Prize, Pitti Uomo, international craft collaborations and a growing fragrance universe, Setchu has developed with unusual clarity. Its clothes may fold, shift and transform, but the idea behind them has remained remarkably steady: make fewer assumptions about what a garment should be, understand how it is made, and leave enough intelligence in the design for the wearer to discover what else it can become.
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