Children of the discordance

Children of the discordance is a Tokyo label founded in 2011 by Hideaki Shikama, Toru Kido and Takayuki Inogawa. It began as a small collective producing hand-printed garments and direct vintage remakes, then came under Shikama’s sole creative direction in 2013. His earlier work at SHIPS, the Harajuku concept store Acycle and its Advantage cycle label gave the project a foundation in buying, product development and the underground clothing cultures of Yokohama and Tokyo.

The label developed wider recognition through New-Vintage-Clothes, a joint reconstruction programme with artist Naoto Yoshida active from 2015. Vintage bandanas, Levi’s denim, military garments and undersized graphic T-shirts are dismantled and rebuilt into contemporary proportions, alongside seasonal ready-to-wear, knitwear, outerwear, footwear and tailoring. The 2017 Tokyo Fashion Award led to presentations in Florence and Paris, followed by a Tokyo runway debut and a Milan digital presentation.

Children of the discordance now operates through an international menswear network while retaining small-batch reconstruction at the centre of its product system. The mainline is joined by New-Vintage-Clothes, the textile-fading project Peroxside and Second Edition™, an accessible line developed for B’2nd. Recent work has expanded the brand’s subcultural vocabulary into deadstock tailoring, formal runway construction and technical collaborations without separating it from Shikama’s Yokohama references.

Shikama approaches clothing through sampling. Military garments, bandanas, sportswear, graffiti, hip-hop graphics and tailoring are treated like fragments in a musical composition, selected for the memories and social codes they carry. He describes the result as rhythmatic: contrast, repetition and interruption give the garment an internal beat instead of a single seasonal theme.

Reconstruction is both a material method and a sizing strategy. Small vintage T-shirts with rare graphics can be disassembled and combined into new oversized forms, while individual bandanas are sorted and mapped before becoming shirts, jackets or patchwork panels. The process preserves irregular colour, wear and print variation, then subjects those traces to exact cutting, handwork and increasingly complex tailoring.

The label does not present vintage use as an environmental claim. Shikama has described authenticity, texture and cultural memory as the reasons for working with existing cloth, while sourcing relationships are built through direct exchange and respect for specialised communities and makers. New materials and scalable ready-to-wear remain part of the system when they support the same visual and cultural logic.