Hideaki Shikama

Hideaki Shikama is a Japanese designer and retail director born in 1980. He grew up around the mixed street cultures of Yokohama, encountering Stüssy at eleven and becoming immersed in East Coast hip-hop, hardcore, skating and local DJ culture during his teens. Visits to New York in the mid-1990s extended that interest into graffiti, record collecting and the clothing codes through which subcultures distinguished themselves.

After attending a small Tokyo fashion school, Shikama joined the Yokohama branch of SHIPS at nineteen. He later worked at the company’s head office, teaching himself garment construction, textile production and graphic design through buying and product development. In 2005 he launched Acycle in Harajuku with SHIPS, directing a concept store of niche labels while designing its Advantage cycle line.

Following Acycle’s closure, Shikama co-founded Children of the discordance in 2011 with Toru Kido and Takayuki Inogawa, taking sole creative direction in 2013. He developed New-Vintage-Clothes with Naoto Yoshida from 2015, won the Tokyo Fashion Award in 2017 and subsequently presented in Florence, Paris, Milan and Tokyo. His later work has expanded the label’s reconstruction practice into formal tailoring and large-scale runway production.

Shikama treats design as a form of sampling. Garments assemble military surplus, bandanas, vintage denim, sportswear, graffiti and music references through abrupt changes of surface and proportion. The combinations follow the rhythm of hip-hop production, where familiar fragments are cut, repeated and repositioned until they acquire a different structure.

His reconstruction methods begin with the economics and physical limits of vintage clothing. Rare small-sized T-shirts are cut apart to recover graphics for new oversized forms, while groups of bandanas are individually sorted before becoming mapped patchwork. With Naoto Yoshida, these processes extend into densely rebuilt denim and one-off garments whose old seams, print variation and wear remain visible.

Shikama does not use vintage material to claim an environmental identity. He has placed greater emphasis on authenticity, memory and textures that new cloth cannot reproduce, combining those qualities with custom textiles, sportswear collaborations and tailored construction. His current work subjects the street references of his Yokohama youth to increasingly exact pattern cutting without neutralising their cultural specificity.