Black cover plate with white serif title: Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear

Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear

Uniform is the oldest grammar in clothing: a way of saying, without a word, that a person belongs to something. Two Tokyo labels of the 1990s took that grammar and wrote with it, one from the garage and one from the field. They are Neighborhood and WTAPS, they began within two years of each other, and their founders were friends who, by one account, helped each other to their first graphics.

This chapter is part of Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them. It sets out what the pages record about the two labels, and says plainly which parts are interpretation. The phrase “militarisation” in the title is ours; none of the pages listed under References uses it. We mean by it the narrow thing the clothes do: borrow the structure, the colours, the sizing and the vocabulary of uniform, and put them to street use.

Takizawa and the Garage

Neighborhood was created by Shinsuke Takizawa in 1994. A profile in Highsnobiety says he first visited Harajuku in the early 1980s and was a close associate of the Major Force record label (whose founding is told in The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene); it gives the label’s two passions as punk rock and motorcycle culture. From American military, biker and rock and roll culture, the same profile says, the label drew a blacked-out, skull-adorned style. Collections of the early 2010s, it adds, referred to the Altamont festival of 1969 and to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The label’s early way of selling is part of its character. Through the late 2000s, the profile says, Neighborhood had no flagship as such. It sold through department stores and boutiques, and through a chain of outlets called HOODS that also stocked WTAPS and a label called Rats. Two collaborations mark its first decade: a limited adidas Originals Superstar in 2004, guided by Gary Aspden and Kazuki Kuraishi, which the profile calls one of the most coveted releases of its day, and a first collaboration with Supreme in 2007, a relationship set in context in Supreme in Japan: Six Doors and a Kinship with the Back Lanes.

The label’s room is Neighborhood; its place among the Ura-Harajuku labels is in the Encyclopedia.

Nishiyama and the Double Tap

Tetsu Nishiyama, who works under the name TET, was born and raised in Tokyo and began his fashion career with a label called Forty Percents Against Rights, usually shortened to FPAR. Heddels dates its start to 1993; the brand’s own page says Nishiyama launched it four years before WTAPS, which would be about 1992. It began as a graphic bootleg label, and its silk-screen prints drew on guerrilla media tactics. The Highsnobiety profile of Neighborhood adds a small, human detail: Takizawa introduced Nishiyama to the Macintosh computer he used for his first WTAPS and FPAR graphics.

WTAPS started in 1996 on the brand’s own account; Highsnobiety says 1997. The name is pronounced “double taps”, and Heddels explains it as a military shooting technique in which two shots are fired in rapid succession at the same target. The first collections, the same article records, included large functional backpacks, boonie hats, cargo trousers and field jackets in olive drab, camouflage and ripstop, with embroidered patches reading “WTAPS”, “ROGUE SQUAD” and “MOUT”. The M-65 field jacket and the BUDS shirt are named as archetypes of the label. Later influences, the article says, include traditional workwear and Ivy League style, and a chambray work shirt of 2005, the Cell Longsleeve, combines the two. The brand’s sizes follow the NATO phonetic alphabet: Lima for large, Sierra for small.

The label’s own site lists a run of forty seasons, carries the slogan “Behind the Balaclava”, and describes itself as releasing from Tokyo. Its flagship, the GIP Store (Gorilla: The Incubation Period) in Shibuya, opened in 2011, is curated by Nishiyama and also stocks FPAR. WTAPS made its first collection with Vans in 2006; a 2016 profile calls the two decade-long collaborators. Collaborations with Porter Yoshida, A Bathing Ape and Supreme date, the Heddels article says, from the late 1990s, without giving years. Nishiyama also founded DESCENDANT with his wife, Mikiko, a family-oriented label with a flagship in Aobadai. The room for the label is WTAPS.

Reading the Uniform

Our reading begins with a distinction the pages invite. Neighborhood’s military is American and mythic: the skull, the black, the biker club, the rock and roll of 1969. WTAPS’s military is, in Heddels’ careful phrase, military generally, and it is technical: patches, sizes, fabrics, the working vocabulary of field gear. The first label wears a story; the second wears a manual.

What they share is a refusal of the logo as the main event. Both labels, in these accounts, build their identity from construction and reference rather than from a mark, and both make the collector’s question a question about era: which season, which collaboration, which condition. That is why, for these two labels in particular, the inside tag matters so much, and why the shop’s descriptions record season and condition as a matter of course.

The deeper background is the long Japanese study of American dress, told in The History of Amekaji and Popular Amekaji Brands. Military surplus, work shirts and Ivy tailoring are all in that story. What Neighborhood and WTAPS add is a Tokyo accent and a youth audience. Our reading is that “militarisation” is the wrong word if it suggests politics, and the right one if it means that, in the 1990s, a generation raised in a country that had renounced war found in uniform a form without a quarrel in it. The pages do not make that claim, and it is offered as interpretation only.

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Questions and answers

When was Neighborhood founded?

In 1994, by Shinsuke Takizawa.

When was WTAPS founded?

In 1996 on the brand’s own account; Highsnobiety says 1997. Its predecessor label, FPAR, began about 1992 or 1993, depending on the account.

What does WTAPS mean?

It is pronounced “double taps”, a military shooting technique in which two shots are fired in rapid succession.

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

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Index terms: neighborhood · shinsuke takizawa · wtaps · double taps · tetsu nishiyama · fpar · forty percents against rights · descendant · hoods · gip store · m-65 · urahara · japanese military streetwear · ura-harajuku

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