Origins examines some of the most iconic figures, brands, stores and neighborhoods in the Highsnobiety universe, breaking down how they left an unforgettable mark on street culture. This installment looks at fragment design founder and Japanese streetwear OG, Hiroshi Fujiwara.

With a legacy in fashion and culture stretching back more than 30 years, there’s more than one reason Hiroshi Fujiwara is commonly referred to as the godfather of streetwear. Mover, shaker, maker of all things coveted and collectible, Fujiwara can be connected in some way to virtually every corner of contemporary fashion. In fact, in some ways, it’s easier to define him not through who he is or the things he’s done, but through the world he has created.

It’s a story that starts in the late ’80s and the early days of Tokyo’s Harajuku scene, leading all the way up to collaborations with some of the world’s most famous brands. Part musician, part designer, part curator, part consultant — some might say Fujiwara is the archetype for the multi-faceted creators now defining mainstream culture. But he’s more than any one of those things; he’s the guy that connects the dots between them.

The early days, GOODENOUGH, and Ura-Harajuku

Hiroshi Fujiwara moved to Tokyo from the town of Ise in the early ’80s at the age of 18. During his early adolescence, he’d become fascinated with London’s punk rock scene. After visiting London, a friend suggested he travel to New York as well.

He arrived amid the eruption of hip-hop, and quickly fell in love with the scene, bringing records and DJ culture back with him to Tokyo. His travels and growing international network of friends even led to him hooking up with Shawn Stussy in Tokyo and becoming the vanguard of the International Stüssy Tribe in Japan.

Over the next few years, the backstreets of Tokyo’s creative Harajuku district would evolve, with Fujiwara at the center of it all. In 1990, following in the footsteps of labels such as Hysteric Glamour, Fujiwara launched GOODENOUGH.

Influenced by Fujiwara’s US contemporaries and his passion for punk, hip-hop, and style, GOODENOUGH gave the scene some of its famous names, such as BAPE contributor and C.E co-founder Sk8thing. It is commonly heralded as one of the first true streetwear brands.

NOWHERE

During this period, Fujiwara came into contact with Jun Takahashi and Tomoaki Nagao, who shared many of his passions. Nagao bore a striking resemblance to Fujiwara, six years his senior, earning him the nickname “Number Two,” or “NIGO” in Japanese.

Takahashi and NIGO were in the process of putting together their retail store NOWHERE, whose doors opened in 1993. The store started out selling imported American goods and memorabilia, and eventually expanded to stock product by Fujiwara and NIGO.

It also stocked FORTY PERCENTS AGAINST RIGHTS, an anarchist-inspired label by Tetsu “TET” Nishiyama of WTAPS fame, and Fujiwara and Takahashi’s AFFA (Anarchy Forever Forever Anarchy). In 1993, Takahashi also founded his own label, UNDERCOVER.

NOWHERE was ground zero for a movement that would birth and nurture brands such as A Bathing Ape, WTAPS, NEIGHBORHOOD, SOPHNET., and many more.

Levi’s Fenom

Another pivotal collaboration with a major brand, the Levi’s Fenom label was launched in the mid ’00s, capitalizing on the selvedge denim trend.

Levi’s Fenom jeans featured a number of elevated details, including precise distressing, premium Talon-branded zippers, metal keyring holsters, and collaborative branding. Made in Japan and produced in limited quantities, the jeans commanded high prices and demonstrated Fujiwara’s gift for leveraging a trend into a marketing exercise.

The Levi’s Fenom imprint stands alongside contemporaries such as NEIGHBORHOOD’s iconic Savage line, visvim’s Social Sculpture, and the likes of Samurai Jeans and Iron Heart as some of the highest-quality denim ever.

THE CONVENI

The latest iteration of Fujiwara’s concept store series is THE CONVENI, which opened in August 2018 in the basement of Ginza Sony Park on the site of the former Sony Building.

As its name suggests, THE CONVENI is a take on the 24-hour convenience stores that litter Japanese cities, selling sodas and refreshments alongside branded shopping bags, homewares, and ceramics, as well as the usual array of collaborations.

THE CONVENI is still going strong, but don’t be surprised if it shuts its doors in August 2019.

With someone whose resumé runs as long as Fujiwara’s, it’s difficult to summarize his career in a single article. Rizzoli’s 2014 monograph Hiroshi Fujiwara: Fragment demonstrates this — you can literally fill a book with the things he has created.

His is the legacy of someone whose work transcends the simple process of creating and selling products. Although he is best known for the products he has created and the logo he has stamped on everything from coffee cups to basketball sneakers, the bigger picture is an expansive project of curation within contemporary consumer culture. Fujiwara is the godfather — he rocked up in Tokyo as a teenager and nothing was the same again.

From Highsnobiety

Hans Ulrich Obrist  You often work in series.

Damien Hirst  I’ve always liked series. I remember looking at Robert Motherwell’s painting when I was young. Do you know ‘Splashes by the Sea’? I thought that was great.        

You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series. If you say something twice, it’s pretty convincing. It’s more convincing than if you say it once. [Laughs].

I think it’s also an implication of endlessness, which kind of theoretically helps you avoid death. I’ve thought quite a lot about it. In a way, that’s why smoking is so sexy. Apart from the addiction, the attraction is that there’s nothing certain in life and things change all the time, but you can always rely on something like a cigarette – which punctuates your whole existence time and time again – to be the same. It’s almost like you’re cheating death. But it’s killing you, so then, smoking becomes even sexier. People are afraid of change, so you create a kind of belief for them through repetition. It’s like breathing. So I’ve always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object.

HUO  A sort of umbilical cord in your work, which is more than a series, is the idea of the aquarium. You’ve spoken about that in many interviews before, but I thought it would be interesting if we could touch on it briefly. It revisits Minimalism but recharges it with a very different content. So how did this aquarium idea start?

DH  I’ve always had a thing about glass. I had a magic mushroom experience very early on where I got a bit freaked out about being symmetrical. I imagined I had a sheet of glass running right through me. Glass became quite frightening. I think glass is quite a frightening substance. I always try and use it. I love going around aquariums, where you get a jumping reflection so that the things inside the tank move; glass becomes something that holds you back and lets you in at the same time. Its’ an amazing material; it’s something solid yet ephemeral. It’s dangerous as well. I just love glass. And it’s a way to separate people but engage them. You can invite them in and keep them away at the same time. It’s probably my favourite material, glass. And water. No, my favourite material is water and then glass. But glass and water are very similar. Glass in water is amazing; glass disappears if you put it in water.

HUO  And there’s the series of animals in formaldehyde.

DH   ‘Natural History’ that was called. I just imagined a zoo of dead animals. I keep thinking that I’m done with that, but then I recently had the idea for the crucifixions, which I think are fucking brilliant; I have to do that. I think there’s a narrative within those now. I was also thinking about doing the Stations of the Cross as fourteen cabinet pieces. I don’t really think they’re a series. I’m not sure.

HUO  How are these paintings made? Are they done by people who work with you, like in Warhol’s Factory?

DH  For two years I worked with a sculptor called Nick Lumb. I was giving him these little photographic images and saying, ‘I want it to look like that.’ But I didn’t really know what I wanted. We didn’t get any results – well, we did, but they were horrible. We were trying to do it with airbrushing. I kept going back to these paintings and hating them. And after all the airbrushing, after two or three years, we just went back to oil paint. When you’ve learnt all that discipline, the oil paint really cracks back in. They’re still not there, but all I know is they’re getting better. They’re getting closer to what I want. I’ve been setting up my own photographs. I’ve taken photographs of diamonds. I’ve been doing photographs of the Beatles; just creating this mass of images that keep piling up. But it’s real chaos because I don’t know what I want. I keep stopping and starting. I keep thinking about Goya and Soutine, and I sort of imagine that at the end of my life I’ll just fucking paint. I’ll be fucking sat in a tiny little room with one light bulb doing self-portraits on my own. There’s a lot of complications with what I do now. You have to be young, you have to be fit, to run the operation that I run, and I certainly don’t think I can get old running an operation like this.

HUO  So the operation will have to reduce?

DH  Yes. It will have to. If you’ve got people working for you, and they’re getting older and you keep replacing them with younger people, and you’re getting old too, it’s going to be mental. But if you keep everybody working for you and they get old, eventually they’re not going to be able to move big things around. So instead of getting rid of them younger, why not make the works smaller? You could make smaller things that they can carry. You’d end up with this fucking studio of old people carrying little things around – ‘Can you make it in wood, please? I can’t carry the steel.’ It would be good if you could do that. I love the idea of a company, an old-fashioned company. I’m just an old-fashioned boy at heart, really.

HUO  Some artists in the 1960s tried to make contracts stating that a work had to be dealt with in a particular way. That was another part of my question: how do you feel about that difficult business?

DH  I don’t mind. There are two things in an artwork, aren’t there? There’s a visual thing and there’s a cerebral thing; there’s a mind thing and an eye thing going on. And then mind thing is always secondary; no matter how great or important conceptual art is, at the end of the day, it’s secondary to the eye thing. If it looks fucking good on the wall, none of that matters; it’s really not important. But I think you’ve got to be careful. When you’re making an artwork, there’s an idea and you play around with it and then it comes to life. But you can have an idea and put things together, and then it doesn’t work. So I suppose if things can come to life then they can also die. You can create an artwork, and it comes to life, but then maybe 500 years later it dies. I’ve never really thought about that. It’s a weird thought; a good thought.

HUO  A limited lifespan? Like buildings.

DH  Yes, like everything else. In my mind I think that art’s immortal, but maybe it has a limited lifespan. All these Old Masters are falling apart, and we’re clinging onto them through preservation. It’s like in that film of HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’, when the books fall apart in his hands. You’ll get that happening with art, I guess. With a Jackson Pollock painting that’s going to happen eventually. Or is it? You can create it digitally. Maybe art is like true love; maybe it never dies. That’s my hope, anyway. But it will die with the world. If we do nothing, the earth is going to smash into the sun, so we’re fucked really.

From DamienHirst.com