Introduction
Makiko Maeara is a designer and co-founder of Obelisk. The current brand profile romanises her name as Maeara Makiko and gives the Japanese form 前新 まきこ. She entered the same bag-design workplace as Yasunori Kaneko as a junior colleague, and their shared experience in accessories became the working relationship from which Obelisk emerged around 1999.
Within the label, Maeara is credited with planning and design alongside Kaneko. Obelisk’s own account describes her contribution as bringing a women’s design perspective into leather fashion, broadening a material field often associated with heavy biker clothing. The partnership helped establish the label’s men’s and women’s output around leather, altered denim, original hardware and the tactile knowledge both designers had developed through bags.
Maeara remains part of the current operation. The live Obelisk designer page continues to identify her as a designer, while the company’s legal-commerce disclosure names 前新 まきこ as the person responsible for webshop sales. Her role therefore spans the creative planning of the product and the direct retail system through which the atelier’s continuous and made-to-order work reaches customers.
Design ethos
Maeara’s design practice sits inside Obelisk’s material-first system, where leather is treated for grain, weight, ageing and movement before it is reduced to a generic luxury surface. Her bag-design background brings attention to joining, hardware and proportion, while the brand’s women’s pieces extend the same construction vocabulary into cuts shaped more closely around the body.
The company specifically associates Maeara with planning and a women’s perspective on leather fashion. In practice this means working within a deliberately heavy material language without accepting a single masculine biker silhouette as its limit. Leather, denim and hardware remain central, but fit, line and drape can shift across the men’s and women’s categories while retaining the atelier’s hand-finished character.
Her work is also inseparable from the brand’s direct production model. Obelisk develops garments through an atelier/shop where customer sizing and custom requests remain part of ordinary practice, so design decisions continue into ordering and delivery rather than ending at a seasonal sample stage. That continuity suits a label built around repeatable core forms, material variation and long use.
Disclaimer
Career history
2014
Obelisk staged an Autumn/Winter exhibition and friends-day order event at its Misuji atelier from 16 to 22 May 2014. The event shows that the atelier could use seasonal presentation and ordering without developing into a conventional runway calendar.
2012
By 2012, Obelisk was operating from Chemin de Soie 1F in Misuji, Taito-ku, combining workshop activity with direct retail. The Misuji site became the durable centre for fittings, custom leather orders, stocked products and customer-facing atelier production and remains the brand’s active shop address in 2026.
1999
Maeara has worked in planning and design with Obelisk from its foundational period after joining Kaneko at their previous bag-design workplace. The current brand still identifies her as a designer, while the live commerce disclosure also names her as the person responsible for webshop sales.
1999
Yasunori Kaneko and Makiko Maeara established Obelisk in Tokyo around 1999 after working in bag design. Their accessories background became the technical basis for a leather- and denim-focused label built around original hardware, customisation and atelier production.
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