Auralee: City Clothes, Hidden Dimensions
Behind the stylish Nezu Museum in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood is a verdant garden, dotted with moss-covered relics and scenic tea houses. Its open blue sky and rustling bamboo fill the surrounding streets with an air of serenity, a pocket of calm impervious to the nearby bustle and traffic. Nestled in this corner of the city is Auralee’s flagship store, off a tree-lined avenue where you can also find Rick Owens and Arts & Science.
Auralee has maintained its elusive IYKYK quality while establishing itself in Japan and beyond, presenting at Paris Fashion Week since 2019. Designed by Ryota Iwai, its calling card is deceptively simple. Through its signature orchestration of colors, silhouettes, and raw materials, Auralee shows us how to peel away the flatness of everyday dressing -- and by extension, our daily routines -- in a way that is reinvigorating yet calm, refined but practical.
Given the pressures of modern life -- the need to be constantly presentable despite the lack of time, the unpredictable weather, the grime of city streets -- our everyday outfits tend to run on a predictable palette of cream and beige against blacks and navies, with maybe a favorite color thrown in. Ease is priceless. But the pragmatism of our choices can also leave us yearning for more depth and texture.
What Auralee offers is the intrigue of texture and the warmth of subtle tints without drifting into whimsy or ostentation. Silky shirts cut from Egyptian Finx cotton. Airy pullovers woven on vintage looms. Mongolian baby cashmere. It sounds almost self-explanatory.
Seen in person, the clothes are more interesting than their bill of materials might suggest. Often there’s a specific detail that’s meant to be experienced, like a pair of denim pants that turn out to be sensuously lightweight, perfect for summertime. The deep consideration given to tactile details gives the clothes their emotional heft, like an antidote to the impersonal efficiency embedded into urban living.
Ultimately, it’s Iwai’s attentiveness to the textures of daily life — the busy subway turnstiles, the late night throughfares, the Sundays at the park -- and his ability to infuse wardrobe staples with an understated buoyancy that transforms getting dressed into a small ritual to look forward to.
Viewed from afar, Auralee may look like a fashion brand without any particular assertion. But clothes are meant to be worn. With laid-back confidence, Auralee shows us how light, texture, and contrast can be folded into the rhythms of everyday life -- like an invisible mist drifting from an evergreen garden.