Masayuki Ino

Masayuki Ino co-founded doublet in 2012 and remains its designer. The label's working phrase, 違和感のある日常着 (iwakan no aru nichijōgi), means everyday clothes with a sense of incongruity. It is a precise description of what Ino does: a sweatshirt, souvenir jacket or pair of jeans looks familiar at first, then an embroidery behaves like fur, a waistband seems to float, or a joke turns out to require improbable manufacturing skill. (Tokyo Fashion Award; Senken Shimbun)

The humour is not packaging placed around a serious garment. It is often the reason the garment had to be engineered differently. That separates doublet from novelty streetwear. Ino starts with the immediate pleasure of recognising a monster, food packet, slogan or badly behaved piece of clothing, then uses pattern, textile development and Japanese specialist production to make the joke physically convincing.

Shoes, belts and a patternmaker

Ino was born in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, in 1979. He graduated from Tokyo Mode Gakuen in 2002, worked as a company designer, then joined Mihara Yasuhiro in 2005. Reliable profiles describe his role there as the planning and production of shoes and accessories. That practical background—dealing with components, factories and objects that need to work—matters more to doublet than a simplified story of sudden creative discovery. (Tokyo Fashion Award; Gunma Prefecture)

He also worked with an Asakusa belt factory and learned from the density of small manufacturers around Tokyo. In 2012 he formed doublet with patternmaker Takashi Murakami, and the pair presented their first exhibition for Spring/Summer 2013. The name comes from Lewis Carroll's word-chain game “Doublets,” in which one word becomes another through a sequence of single-letter changes. For Ino it suggests design through connection: an ordinary item is moved step by step until it becomes something else. (Hypebeast Japan; Sugino Fashion College, Fashion力 no. 37)

In its debut year doublet received the highest, Governor of Tokyo award in the professional division of the Tokyo New Designer Fashion Grand Prix. The Tokyo Fashion Award followed in 2017, bringing support for Paris showrooms across two seasons. Ino also staged doublet's first Tokyo runway for Autumn/Winter 2017. Paris sales activity, Tokyo runway debut and later participation in the official Paris calendar are distinct milestones and should not be compressed into one “Paris debut.” (Tokyo Fashion Award; Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo)

Vintage clothes as a textbook

Ino calls vintage clothing a textbook. A worn souvenir jacket or college sweatshirt holds evidence about machinery, thread, regional manufacture and the way an owner changed it through use. doublet does not reproduce that evidence politely. It enlarges, unravels or mutates it until the viewer has to notice the construction that nostalgia usually smooths over. (Hypebeast Japan; Vogue Japan)

Embroidery is central. Threads can be built up into shaggy animal faces, souvenir motifs can spill beyond their expected frame, and lettering can appear to melt or grow. Other pieces use three-dimensional printing, distressing, transfer processes and elaborate washing. The visible absurdity depends on technicians who can make a process repeatable enough for production without sanding away the accident that made it interesting. (Sugino Fashion College, Fashion力 no. 37; Tokyo Fashion Award interview)

That relationship with makers also keeps the work from settling into graphics alone. A cut may force the shoulder into an awkward angle; a trouser's waist can be suspended away from the body; a jacket may look eaten, overgrown or inflated. Ino wants the wearer to discover the trick, so the inside construction and the way the object moves often matter as much as its front-facing image.

The LVMH Prize changed the scale

On 6 June 2018 Ino won the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, becoming its first Japanese grand-prize recipient. The award brought €300,000 and a year of mentoring, but its cultural effect was at least as important: an independent label built from jokes, Japanese production knowledge and an unfashionable base in suburban Tokyo had been judged on equal terms with globally promoted young houses. (GQ Japan; WWDJAPAN)

The prize did not make the work more solemn. Instead, later collections increased the scale of their situations. Autumn/Winter 2020 included a split-mouth mask developed around Hitoshi Iwaaki's manga Parasyte, while the digital presentation also acknowledged the improvised, do-it-yourself conditions of the pandemic. Autumn/Winter 2022 crossed a physical show in Ashikaga with virtual space, turning the uncertainty between screen and garment into its subject. (FASHIONSNAP; Senken Shimbun)

For Spring/Summer 2023, IF YOU WANT IT made snow fall inside a Paris venue and built clothes around apparently impossible wishes. Rust-coloured recycled leather and surfaces that seemed weathered or transformed carried the fantasy back into material. The next cycles named their archetypes openly: MONSTER, an AI-centred Spring/Summer 2024, THE CURE, IDOL and VILLAIN. Each title offered an accessible door, while the clothes complicated who was being celebrated or feared. (SPUR; doublet official site)

Materials with a specific history

doublet's environmental work is strongest when it names a waste stream and lets its physical character remain visible. Projects have used discarded Japanese wool, old fur, recycled leather, fishing nets and food waste. These are not interchangeable “sustainable materials”: each brings limitations in colour, strength, scale and processing, and those limitations become part of the design. (SPUR; Gunma Prefecture)

The Wacoal collaboration Melooop turned egg and milk packages into pouches, connecting the familiar supermarket container to Wacoal's material-recovery programme. For Autumn/Winter 2026, AIR, doublet used Zephyr yarn incorporating material derived from captured carbon dioxide. An air-guitar premise and inflatable forms made the invisible resource legible without asking the runway to behave like a technical report. (Wacoal Holdings; doublet official site)

Collaborations with Asics, WISM, Blanc and Kids Love Gaite follow the same preference for transforming a partner's actual object. The strongest doublet collaboration is not a logo exchange. It asks what is strange about an egg box, a running shoe or a familiar frame, then exaggerates that property until the original can no longer be overlooked.

Reading doublet garments

doublet does not publish a universal code that translates every care label into a season. Authentication and dating should begin with the complete internal style number, fibre and country-of-origin labels, then move to official runway and retailer images. Theme recognition helps—hyperreal moss, floating waists, egg packs and villain-cover graphics point to specific recent stories—but popular motifs are also those most likely to be copied.

Construction is the harder clue to fake. Check whether embroidery has real depth rather than a flat printed simulation, whether transformed parts continue through the back and inside, and whether distressing follows the material rather than sitting uniformly on top. Ino's work rewards the same close look it initially interrupts with a joke. The incongruity opens the door; the manufacturing is what keeps the garment interesting after the punchline.

References

• Tokyo Fashion Award. “doublet.” Designer and brand profile, accessed September 2026.
• Tokyo Fashion Award. “井野将之インタビュー.” Accessed September 2026.
• Senken Shimbun. “doublet.” Brand profile, accessed September 2026.
• Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo. “井野将之インタビュー.” Accessed September 2026.
• Mitsuko Watanabe. “doublet井野将之に聞く、違和感のある日常着.” Vogue Japan, 25 May 2018.
• Hypebeast Japan. “HYPEBEASTが訪ねる、doublet井野将之のスタジオ.” July 2018.
• Sugino Fashion College. “井野将之インタビュー.” Fashion力, no. 37.
• Gunma Prefecture. “クリエイティブの現場から：井野将之.” Accessed September 2026.
• GQ Japan. “doubletがLVMHプライズを受賞.” 8 June 2018.
• WWDJAPAN. “LVMHプライズ、井野将之のdoubletがグランプリ.” 6 June 2018.
• SPUR. “doubletが考える、服と循環.” 23 September 2022.
• FASHIONSNAP. “doublet 2022年秋冬コレクション.” 2022.
• Wacoal Holdings. “ワコールとdoubletによるMelooop.” 27 June 2025.
• doublet. “Official site.” Accessed September 2026.