Black cover plate with white serif title: The Fujiwara Orbit, Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene

The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene

Every scene is said to have a centre, and every centre, examined closely, turns out to be a habit of attention. The habit that gathered the labels of the back lanes belonged to Hiroshi Fujiwara: a man who listened, travelled, wrote it down, passed it on, and then, with a precision that has become part of the legend, kept his own name off the thing he had made.

This chapter follows the circle he drew, in the order the pages give it. It belongs to Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them, which holds the map of the whole district; the labels named here have rooms in the shop, linked at the end. Dates come from the pages listed under References, and where those pages disagree the text says so.

A Return from London

Two magazine profiles agree on the outline. Fujiwara moved to Tokyo from Ise at eighteen, in the early 1980s, and one of them gives the year as 1981. Trips to London showed him punk; trips to New York showed him hip-hop; he brought the records and the habits of the disc jockey home. The profiles differ on the dating of his own early steps, so this chapter fixes none of them more closely than the pages do.

What follows from that outline is not clothing. It is a way of receiving foreign culture: take it in at its origin, sort it, and give it back in Tokyo in a form its originators had not imagined. Our reading is that this is the single most useful sentence to hold in mind through everything below.

A Song, a Record Label and a Column

In 1985 the group Tiny Panx, first called Tinnie Punx, released a debut album, Kensetsuteki. In 1988 Fujiwara co-founded the independent label Major Force with Toshio Nakanishi and KUDO. That same year, according to a history of the column, he and Kan Takagi, performing as Tinnie Punx, released a song called “Last Orgy”, and were then invited to write a column of the same name for Takarajima, a magazine given over mainly to subcultures. It ranged over fashion, films and music, whatever its writers were interested in at the time, and it was later made into a television programme.

The column had successors. Nigo and Jun Takahashi were asked to follow it with a column of their own, begun in 1991 under the title “AZ” and renamed “Last Orgy 2”, which stopped in 1994 when Takahashi was busy with an Undercover collection and the magazine changed its name and art direction. The same history says the column began a culture of resale, because the things it featured sold out and their prices rose. That is a claim about a magazine thirty years ago, from one writer; it is repeated here as theirs.

Goodenough, 1990

Goodenough dates from 1990 in the accounts this chapter relies on; one encyclopaedia account says the late 1980s. One profile says it was inspired by Stüssy and by a Japanese label called Anarchic Adjustment; another says only that it grew from Fujiwara’s American contemporaries and his interest in punk, hip-hop and style. A history of the Last Orgy column says the brand was introduced through that series and that most readers thought it came from London.

The most characteristic fact about Goodenough is an absence. The designer’s identity was kept secret for a while. The profile that tells this quotes Fujiwara’s book Oka no ue no Punk: to reveal it, he said, would have led fans to buy anything rather than attend to the clothing. The same profile lists several people at the start, among them Fujiwara, the designer SK8THING and a select-shop owner, Toru Iwai, and says that SK8THING approached Fujiwara about making a T-shirt together. In 1995, it adds, Fujiwara stopped operations for half a year and limited the stockists to ten shops run by friends, saying that carrying on as before would reduce the brand’s value. The label continued until 2017, when it was announced as over.

Our reading: a label that hides its author and then rations its stockists is making an argument about attention, and about what a brand is worth when it is not for sale to everyone. The argument was understood at once. It is one reason the label is remembered as an ancestor of the streetwear that followed. One profile calls it one of the first true streetwear brands; another calls it one of the most important and influential labels of the Ura-Hara scene.

The Shop at the End of a Lane

Nowhere opened in 1993, in a maze of alleys in Ura-Harajuku. Wikipedia’s article on A Bathing Ape gives the date as 1 April and names its founders as Nigo and Jun Takahashi; a magazine history calls it a cramped, tiny space that sold vintage American clothing, deadstock sneakers and the early collections of Undercover and A Bathing Ape, and says it closed in 2000. How it was paid for is told three ways: that the two founders pooled modest savings; that Nigo borrowed four million yen from an acquaintance who also lent him the shop; and that Fujiwara funded it so that the two could lead Tokyo’s streetwear scene. The accounts are not reconciled here.

The shop belongs in this chapter because the profile of Fujiwara calls both founders his mentees, and because it is the clearest evidence that the circle had a physical address. Their own labels are treated in Play as Power for A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi and Undercover; their rooms are A Bathing Ape, NIGO and Undercover.

AFFA: A Collaboration Kept Small

AFFA, short for Anarchy Forever Forever Anarchy, was the first collaboration between Fujiwara and Takahashi. A 2007 Hypebeast report says it was originally conceived in 1994, that each release is kept secret and made in extremely low quantities, and describes one release as a button-up shirt and a three-quarter-length raglan shirt carrying a grid print. A magazine profile says it was inspired by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, that it never reached the mainstream, and that both designers then concentrated on their own brands. A 2008 Hypebeast item pairs AFFA with visvim’s Serra Alpine, a small reminder that the circle overlapped with other circles.

It has a room in the shop, AFFA, which will fill as pieces arrive.

The Tribe in Tokyo

The Californian label Stüssy gathered an informal group called the International Stüssy Tribe: members in cities from New York and London to Tokyo, who wore matching varsity jackets and were, in our reading, the label’s way of travelling. Fujiwara is named in every account as the Tokyo member. The first tribe party was held in Japan, which one member dates to 1990; another account records a tribe meeting in Tokyo in 1991, with guests including Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery. A profile of Fujiwara says he met Shawn Stussy in Tokyo and became the vanguard of the tribe in Japan. The full story of that label is told in Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe.

Label into Laboratory

Fujiwara’s later work widens the circle. HTM, the Nike project named for Hiroshi, Tinker Hatfield and Mark Parker, dates from 2002, according to one profile; another names the Air Presto as a standout release. Fragment design, which another profile calls a brand, a design agency and a consultancy together, emerged in 2003 and is his principal label today. The list of collaborations a profile gives is long: Supreme (Goodenough × Supreme, 2000), Levi’s (the Fenom line, 2006), Converse (2010), Nike (the Air Jordan 1 and Air Trainer 1, 2014), Louis Vuitton (for autumn and winter 2017, with Kim Jones) and Moncler (2020, in its Genius project).

The circle also reaches sideways. Fujiwara co-leads uniform experiment, one of the three lines of the house of SOPH., described in N.HOOLYWOOD and SOPHNET.: Two Houses of Considered Uniform. He made a capsule with WACKO MARIA for MR PORTER in 2019, described in Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA. The rooms for his own names are Goodenough and Fragment Design.

Our Reading: A Circle, Not a Chain

It is tempting to tell this story as a chain of apprenticeships: Fujiwara teaches Nigo and Takahashi, they teach everyone else. The pages are warmer and more tangled than that. A song becomes a column; the column becomes a pair of columns; a shop opens in an alley; a T-shirt label hides its author; a collaboration stays small on purpose. At no stage does anyone appear to have set out to found an industry. What the record shows is a handful of friends with unusually good taste and unusually little interest in being sold to everyone, and the clothing that follows from that disposition.

After Goodenough, Fragment, AFFA or a Nowhere-era piece? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.

Questions and answers

Who is Hiroshi Fujiwara?

A Tokyo musician, writer and designer who founded Goodenough in 1990, took part in AFFA from 1994, and has led Fragment design since 2003.

What was Nowhere?

A small shop in Ura-Harajuku opened in 1993 by Nigo and Jun Takahashi, which sold vintage American clothing, deadstock sneakers and the early collections of Undercover and A Bathing Ape. It closed in 2000.

What does AFFA stand for?

Anarchy Forever Forever Anarchy.

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: hiroshi fujiwara · goodenough · fragment design · affa · anarchy forever forever anarchy · nowhere harajuku · last orgy · takarajima · major force · tiny panx · international stüssy tribe · htm · sk8thing · ura-harajuku

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