MASU

MASU was founded in 2020 in Tokyo by Japanese designer Eito Masu, a former Maison Margiela menswear designer who launched the brand specifically focused on what he described as 'the visual continuity between 1960s-1970s European arthouse cinema, 1990s anti-fashion Japanese street culture, and the contemporary Tokyo streetwear-meets-luxury conversation.' The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce a menswear-and-womenswear vocabulary that read as a deliberate-archival recovery of multiple historical fashion-conversation moments, rebuilt for the contemporary Paris-fashion-week luxury context. The MASU vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deconstructed leather-and-wool outerwear with deliberately exaggerated proportions and asymmetric construction, hand-printed silk shirts referencing European-cinema costume-design archives (the brand's seasonal collections have referenced Pasolini, Antonioni, and Visconti among others), washed-cotton workwear referencing 1990s Japanese anti-fashion-aesthetic culture, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, oxblood, washed-charcoal, ecru, and the brand's recurring use of cinematic-saturated red. The brand has presented at Paris Men's Fashion Week each season since 2022 and was nominated for the LVMH Prize semi-finalist position in 2023. The brand is independent and held by Masu. MASU operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, the Beams network in Tokyo, and a small set of carefully chosen luxury menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more conceptually rigorous post-2020 Tokyo menswear debuts, with the cinematic-and-archival-reference framework specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'multi-generational-fashion-history' conversation that has been rewritten in the post-2020 Paris-and-Tokyo menswear conversation.