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Masaki Matsushima
デザイナー

Masaki Matsushima

Founder and Designer, MASAKI MATSUSHIMA

Japanese designer who founded MASAKI MATSUSHIMA in 1992 and has directed United Arrows' Drawer label since 2015.

生年 1963
出身地 Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan
国籍 Japanese
メゾン 2

Masaki Matsushima founded MASAKI MATSUSHIMA in 1992 and later added a concurrent role directing Drawer for United Arrows. His name also appears on Masaki Matsushima eyes, an eyewear licence operated by Sunreeve. These are separate product systems: a frame, a Drawer garment and a namesake runway piece cannot be dated or attributed from the Matsushima name alone. (Masaki Matsushima eyes; United Arrows)

From Nagoya to the Tokio Kumagai workshop

Matsushima was born on 14 July 1963 in Nagoya, in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan. (ファショコン通信) He trained at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, one of the schools that produced the generation of Japanese designers who built independent houses through the 1980s and 1990s, graduating from its fashion engineering course in 1985. He joined Tokio Kumagai International as an assistant designer the same year he graduated. (アクイール; drk7.jp)

Tokio Kumagai was the working name of Toshio Kumagai, a shoe designer born in Sendai in 1947 who studied at Bunka Fashion College from 1966, won the student Sōen Award while still enrolled, then moved to Paris in 1970. He worked for Jean-Charles de Castelbajac before turning freelance and supplying designs to Fiorucci and others. In 1981 he opened a boutique called Tokio Kumagai on the Place des Victoires, built mainly around women's shoes but also stocking ready-to-wear and accessories, and eventually ran three shops in Paris while a menswear ready-to-wear line was produced in Japan. Kumagai's own shoes ran to the theatrical: monochrome lace-ups sat alongside pumps modelled as mice and ladybirds, and a series nicknamed the "edible shoes" used the same resin techniques as Japanese food-sample models to cast a shoe in the shape of a mound of sekihan rice. Kumagai died in Paris of illness in 1987, the same year he won the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prize. (Asahi Shimbun, "トキオ・クマガイ 色あせない魅力 80年代に活躍した靴デザイナー", 27 May 2022)

The brand did not close with him. The Asahi Shimbun's account of a Kyoto Costume Institute retrospective states that Tokio Kumagai passed to two designers after his death: Yoichi Nagasawa, who had been Kumagai's assistant, and Matsushima, who had been responsible for developing the brand in Japan; between them they kept it running until 1992. (Asahi Shimbun) Within that arrangement, Matsushima was named designer of Tokio Kumagai Homme de Nuit in October 1987, in the month following Kumagai's death. In February 1990 he designed the stage costumes for Ryuichi Sakamoto's "BEAUTY" world tour, and that October he was made chief designer of Tokio Kumagai's Japan operation. (アクイール; 世界のファッションデザイナー)

Tokio Kumagai gave Matsushima an unusual education in translating graphic ideas into three-dimensional products. His own house would use a more restrained visual language, but it retained that attention to how an object reads from the outside. (Asahi Shimbun; ファショコン通信)

A house of his own, shown in Tokyo and Paris

Tokio Kumagai wound down in 1992, and that April Matsushima incorporated Masaki Matsushima International and started his own label. The house debuted at Tokyo Collection that October. (ファショコン通信; Fashion Press Japan) Its stated concept, as printed by the Japanese trade site Fashocon Tsushin, was "to express fashion that can only be seen through a two-dimensional eye in a way that is also stylish on the inside" (ファショコン通信) — a way of describing clothes built to photograph flat and read graphic, then reward a second look at how they are cut and worn.

Two years later, in September 1994, Matsushima set up a Paris operation, Masaki Matsushima Europe S.A.R.L., and the house entered the Paris ready-to-wear calendar for Spring/Summer 1995 with a womenswear collection, followed by a Spring/Summer 1996 menswear debut. (ファショコン通信; drk7.jp; 世界のファッションデザイナー) From that point the house ran twin calendars, showing in Tokyo and in Paris in both womenswear and menswear each season.

Eyewear, a Ginza flagship and a second Paris line

MASAKI MATSUSHIMA's identity outside Japan's own fashion press rests largely on eyewear. Frames and sunglasses carrying the Masaki Matsushima name are designed and sold under licence by Sunreeve Co., Ltd, whose own site describes the eyewear as a distinct operation from the ready-to-wear house, with its own seasonal releases running into 2026. (Masaki Matsushima eyes) Retailers selling that eyewear describe its design brief as functionality first, "fusing a futuristic, solid styling with an ordinary, everyday style" (めがねのまつい) — a frame line built to be worn daily rather than as a display piece, in keeping with the wider house's stated interest in clothes that read as considered rather than merely graphic.

That licence sits alongside a run of retail and directorial work Matsushima has taken on outside his own label. In 2008 he became the fashion director of Eight Million, the first select shop opened in Ginza by the handbag company Samantha Thavasa. (アクイール) He has also put his name to T-mat Masaki-Paris, a Paris-based menswear and womenswear line distinct from the MASAKI MATSUSHIMA mainline, which is stocked in Japan by the retailer Beams. (BEAMS) Each of these is a separate commercial arrangement rather than an extension of the mainline collection: the eyewear is Sunreeve's product, Eight Million was Samantha Thavasa's shop, and T-mat Masaki-Paris is sold apart from Masaki Matsushima International's own collection.

A second design chair: Drawer

Since 2015, Matsushima has also served as artistic director of Drawer, the contemporary womenswear label owned by the retailer United Arrows — a concurrent post held alongside his own house rather than a replacement for it. United Arrows' own retail copy credits the "sense of luxury" running through Drawer's clothes to Matsushima's design standards, and when the interior design studio Wonderwall built Drawer's Futakotamagawa store, its own project notes describe working with Matsushima as the brand's director on the store's concept. (United Arrows; Wonderwall) As of a United Arrows profile dated September 2024, he remained in the role. (United Arrows)

Drawer belongs to United Arrows' retail portfolio rather than operating as Matsushima's independent runway house. He directs its aesthetic under the Drawer name while continuing his namesake work separately. (United Arrows)

Labels, licences and how to read the work

Identify which of four systems produced the item:

  • MASAKI MATSUSHIMA: Matsushima's own house, founded in 1992.
  • Drawer: United Arrows womenswear directed by Matsushima from 2015, carrying Drawer's labels rather than his name.
  • T-mat Masaki-Paris: a separate line stocked by retailers including Beams.
  • Masaki Matsushima eyes: eyewear licensed to Sunreeve. (Fashion Press Japan; United Arrows; BEAMS; Masaki Matsushima eyes)

Anything Matsushima designed before 1992 belonged to Tokio Kumagai and should carry that house's labelling, including Homme de Nuit. His namesake house debuted in Tokyo in October 1992; its Paris womenswear begins with Spring/Summer 1995 and menswear with Spring/Summer 1996. Those dates set useful lower bounds for early runway pieces but do not identify an exact season. (Asahi Shimbun; ファショコン通信)

Do not transfer dates between categories. Sunreeve eyewear follows its own release schedule, while a Drawer garment requires United Arrows' collection record to connect it to Matsushima's tenure. Sharing a designer does not make either one part of the MASAKI MATSUSHIMA runway chronology. (Masaki Matsushima eyes; United Arrows)

References

記録
生年
1963年7月14日
原語表記
松島正樹
学歴
Bunka Fashion College (1985)

主な作品

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