Black cover plate with white serif title: Rock, Print and Reverence, Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine, WACKO MARIA

Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA

Fandom is usually treated as the lesser form of appreciation: the enthusiast’s devotion, set below the critic’s detachment. The three labels of this chapter reverse that ranking. Each was founded by someone who loved a body of music, image or film so thoroughly that the love became a method, and the clothes are what the method produces. Hysteric Glamour began in 1984, Number (N)ine in the late 1990s, WACKO MARIA in 2005. Together they mark a long, loud, well-printed line through Tokyo’s back lanes.

This chapter belongs to Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them. It records what the pages listed under References say, notes where they differ, and keeps our own interpretation to the final section.

A Club Kid and a Poster in Shinjuku

Nobuhiko Kitamura describes himself as a club kid, according to a Sabukaru profile. He studied at Tokyo Mode Gakuen, held part-time jobs including event planning, and sketched designs part-time for a cultural brand and hub called Ozone Community, which offered him a label of his own after he graduated. A second account, from NSS, adds an origin: as a teenager he met Western counterculture through the punk of the Sex Pistols and Blondie and American new wave, and found a poster for the fashion school while buying imported records in Shinjuku. He graduated, it says, in 1984.

The name, Sabukaru says, came from a search for words with no Japanese equivalent, which reminded him of Patti Smith and Debbie Harry. The label was intended as unisex and, on the same account, went into menswear officially in 2001. The first collection, it adds, sold out with barely any promotion. Wikipedia and Sabukaru both give 1984 as the founding year; NSS does not state one. That is the year used in the hub’s table.

Posters, Photobooks and a Warhol Collection

The visual language is the part everyone remembers. Sabukaru lists 1970s concert posters, B-grade films, mass consumerism, and cult-film and pin-up references; NSS lists late 1960s and early 1970s advertising, and Andy Warhol’s reworkings of it, with punk, new wave, psychedelia and comics alongside. Wikipedia says the label’s designs refer to comic books and hippie culture, and that T-shirts depict Marc Bolan and the Sex Pistols. NSS also says the label rebuilds vintage garments and military surplus, and calls the feel “chaotic and rough” with an artisanal approach. The Americana in it, Sabukaru says, runs to varsity jackets, military fatigues, trucker hats and denim, which is why it describes the label as the Ura-Harajuku take on Americana.

The NSS account gives the record of its early collaborations. The first official collaboration was with Sonic Youth. In 1993 came photobooks with guest art directors Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Terry Richardson, Russ Meyer and Rita Ackerman, and a limited collection with the Andy Warhol Foundation. A 2013 collaboration with Playboy followed. The Supreme collaborations are counted differently by the pages: NSS and Wikipedia both date the first to September 2017, for autumn and winter that year; NSS describes a second released on 18 March 2021, and Wikipedia lists a second in November 2024. Whether those are the same pair of releases is not something the pages settle, and this chapter does not either.

London, New York and the Gallery

The label’s early travels are told in the pages as a short list. NSS says a temporary store opened in New York in the late 1980s and lasted two years, and a first store opened in London in 1991. Sabukaru says Michael Kopelman of GIMME FIVE wanted to bring the label to London in the late 1980s, and that members of Soul II Soul wore the pieces there; Kopelman is also named among the International Stüssy Tribe in Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe. Sabukaru adds that Kitamura ignored the Paris ambitions of many Japanese brands and concentrated on Tokyo’s streets and club kids.

Today, Wikipedia says, the label has 51 stores in Japan, in districts including Harajuku, Aoyama, Shibuya and Shinjuku, with international stores in Hong Kong, London and Paris and none in the United States. NSS notes a Tokyo gallery, Rat Hole Gallery, which it calls the culmination of the label’s collaborative art activity, and adds that Kitamura appears briefly in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. NSS also claims the label paved the way for Undercover, A Bathing Ape and Number (N)ine; that is NSS’s judgement, and we cite it as such. The room is Hysteric Glamour.

A Beatles Track and a Closed Feeling

Takahiro Miyashita was born in Tokyo in 1973, according to NSS. Number (N)ine was founded in 1997 on most accounts, with one giving 1996. The shows were in Tokyo from 2000 to 2004 and in Paris from 2004 to 2009; the last, for autumn and winter 2009, was called “A Closed Feeling”. His departure was announced on 20 February 2010, and the label was sold that year. The name, NSS and a Highsnobiety interview agree, comes from the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”.

The rock in Number (N)ine is explicit. NSS ties an autumn and winter 2003 striped jumper to Kurt Cobain, and describes a collection for autumn and winter 2005, “The High Streets”, shown to Nirvana. Collaborations include a Gore-Tex jacket with visvim in April 2008, treated in visvim: Return to Sacred Making; a Vans Old Skool in May 2008; and a Converse Odessa in 2010. After the sale Miyashita started The Soloist, established in 2010 with a first collection that July. In September 2025 he announced a return to Number (N)ine, and a collection was released on 30 April 2026. The rooms are Number (N)ine and The Soloist.

Two Footballers and a Bar

WACKO MARIA was founded by Atsuhiko Mori and Keiji Ishizuka, both former J-League footballers, as Mr Porter and Sabukaru both say. Sabukaru says they went into drinking, music and nightlife after they retired, ran a Tokyo bar called ROCK STEADY, and later sold it; it adds that Mori now leads the brand alone and is an avid vinyl collector and lover of punk rock. Mr Porter says the brand started as a Tokyo record store, with a first collection in 2005; Sabukaru gives 2005 as the founding year, and neither page names the shop’s opening. That is how the hub’s table has it.

The clothes carry the record shelves with them. Mr Porter describes a vinyl records-print shirt and a herringbone suit jacket with a leopard-print lining; the flagship, it says, houses a large vinyl collection, and Sabukaru names it PARADISE TOKYO, with a coffee shop at its entrance as a meeting place for the community. The label’s “Killer Tunes Broadcast” and SoundCloud mixtapes carry music Mori has collected, and the slogan “Guilty Parties” appears on a zebra-print camp-collar shirt. That shirt has a story in the Mr Porter article: Hiroshi Fujiwara had a zebra-print Hawaiian shirt that came with a record by The Specials, and Mori turned it into the camp-collar version for a capsule made with Fujiwara for Mr Porter’s The Japan Edit, dated 24 May 2019. Collaborators named by Mr Porter are the film-makers Jim Jarmusch and Larry Clark and the collage artist Weirdo Dave; Sabukaru names Basquiat and Larry King. Neither gives years. The room is WACKO MARIA; the Fujiwara link is traced in The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene.

Our Reading: Fandom as Method

Set the three labels next to one another and a single working habit appears. Kitamura starts from Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and a poster for a school; Miyashita starts from a Beatles track and a grunge singer; Mori starts from a vinyl shelf and the nightlife that followed a football career. None of them starts from clothing. In our reading, that is the reason their garments read as chapters in something larger, a record collection or a gig poster, rather than as products, and the reason they collect so well: the references are legible, and the references are loved.

It also explains why the label names on these pages are inseparable from a person’s name and a person’s taste. For the larger story of how such taste travelled across the Pacific, Japanese Streetwear: A Field Guide is the starting point; for another Tokyo house built on a single graphic symbol, see mastermind JAPAN.

After Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine or WACKO MARIA from a particular season? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.

Questions and answers

When was Hysteric Glamour founded?

In 1984, according to Wikipedia and Sabukaru, by Nobuhiko Kitamura.

Where does the name Number (N)ine come from?

From the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”, according to NSS and a Highsnobiety interview.

Who founded WACKO MARIA?

Atsuhiko Mori and Keiji Ishizuka, both former J-League footballers; Mori now leads the brand. Its first collection was in 2005.

References

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

Continue reading

Index terms: hysteric glamour · nobuhiko kitamura · ozone community · number (n)ine · takahiro miyashita · the soloist · wacko maria · atsuhiko mori · guilty parties · paradise tokyo · japanese rock fashion · ura-americana · ura-harajuku

Volver al blog

Deja un comentario

Ten en cuenta que los comentarios deben aprobarse antes de publicarse.