Return to Sacred Making: Hiroki Nakamura and visvim

visvim is a clothing label that behaves like a workshop. Its founder, Hiroki Nakamura, has built a catalogue around a small number of objects, chiefly a moccasin-inspired shoe, and around a conviction that making should be slow, traceable and a little sacred. The brand’s own myths are charming and often wrong. This essay sets out what the record supports and corrects what it does not.

A designer who came from snow

Hiroki Nakamura was born in Kofu, grew up in Tokyo and spent his teenage years in Alaska. He later spent eight years as a designer at Burton, the snowboard company. That mountain background fits the label’s interest in outdoor technique and in leather that has lived in weather.

The name and the date

visvim was founded in 2000 or 2001; Wikipedia’s infobox says 2000 and its body text 2001, and Complex says 2000 while BoF and Yokogao say 2001. Complex reports that ‘vis’ and ‘vim’ were picked from a dictionary and carry no intended meaning. The first FBT shoe appeared in the second collection, in 2001.

FBT

FBT is not an acronym for ‘Folk Boat’ or ‘Foot Bottom’. It is named for Fun Boy Three, the British band, after Hiroshi Fujiwara pointed Nakamura to the moccasins worn by Terry Hall. The shoe is made with elk leather and an EVA Phylon midsole, which is what makes a moccasin walk like a trainer. A later model, the FBT Ancestor, is named for the Nez Perce. The Christo sandal draws on the wrapped forms of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

F.I.L. and the stores

F.I.L. means Free International Laboratory, not ‘Fabric Is Life’. F.I.L. Tokyo is in Jingumae, Shibuya; F.I.L. Kanazawa opened on 3 November 2007 and F.I.L. Ginza in 2023. The WMV store in Nakameguro opened in 2019 (Honeyee) or 2020 (Time Out), and General Store followed in July 2022.

Collaboration

• Number (N)ine, a Gore-Tex jacket, April 2008.
• Comme des Garçons, an Isetan project in 2008.
• Fragment and Undercover, fringed FBT models.

The sacred in making

The phrase sacred making is ours, not the brand’s, and we use it as a reading. It points to a design practice that treats the object as a record of the hands, materials and places that made it, with elk leather above all. In this, visvim sits beside Kapital and the Kojima mills in the lineage of Japanese craft discussed in What Is Japanese Craft Philosophy?

Collecting notes

• FBT in the early seasons and in collaborations; check leather fringe, the midsole and the footbed.
• Sizing. Compare with a measured pair rather than trusting a label size.
• Condition. Elk leather softens with wear; look for staining and for hard creases.

Why Japan

visvim is a Tokyo label with its F.I.L. stores in Japan, and its early customers there kept their pairs. The Japanese pre-owned wardrobe therefore holds early FBT and collaboration pairs in good order.

In the archive now

• visvim · Kapital · Fragment Design · Number (N)ine

Continue reading

• Kapital: Patchwork, Indigo and the Spirit of Kojima
• What Is Japanese Craft Philosophy?
• mastermind JAPAN: Dark Symbols
• Encyclopedia entry · The Fashionista Bible

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Index terms: visvim · hiroki nakamura · visvim fbt · fun boy three · visvim christo · free international laboratory · visvim collaborations · visvim history