To Bring the Best Out of Matthew Williams & 424, Invite Them to Your Birthday

If there were ever an Avengers-style linkup of fashion’s foremost fabric distressers, it would look something like this. 

For the 20th anniversary of luxury-street Japanese retailer Nubian, Matthew M. Williams, LA-based avant-garde menswear brand 424, and Japanese labels Needles and D.HYGEN all contributed expertly constructed, gorgeously deconstructed garments. Something about ringing in a brand’s major milestone really brings it out of them. 

Think of Nubian as an expert matchmaker here (or Nick Fury, if you’re Marvel-pilled). Williams garnered a reputation for mixing utilitarian hardware, sharply tailored leather, and elevated streetwear into both his previous label, 1017 ALYX 9SM, and his four-year stint at Givenchy — making him a perfect complement to the low-key leather obsessives who founded D.HYGEN in Osaka over a decade ago. Meanwhile, Guillermo Andrade’s 424 label and Keizo Shimizu’s Needles have both perfected the art of reworking vintage workwear, with 424 pulling its wares in a more modern direction that leans heavily biker-grunge, while Needles feels comparatively retro. 

None of these four is technically collaborating with each other here — each brand sent its own pieces, elevated for the collection. But what makes this add up to one coherent, exceedingly textural composition is that these are the respective brands’ own bread-and-butter items, pushed to their most extreme, labor-intensive version. Nubian didn’t just curate four brands that happen to all be really, really good at ripping, repairing, and reconstructing. It inspired each of them to go above and beyond — making the case that, actually, perhaps these brands ought to be working together. 

The patchwork military jacket of contrasting uber-shredded fabric panels and shaggy rip-and-repair jeans provided by Williams are an extension of the artisanally worn-out stuff he put forth at Givenchy and continues creating with Japanese punk-leather label Blackmeans. These two pieces slot in naturally next to 424’s repaired pants, which level up the LA label’s signature leather trousers with brush-like scuffs and rips. Or Needles’ textural corduroy tracksuits. Or D.HYGEN’s signature python and horsehide cutoff leather gloves, finished with a zipper running up to the middle finger. 

As is usually the case with the greatest grails, this one is Japan-exclusive, releasing on August 1 at Nubian’s stores in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo. 

It’s a shame something like this is hard to get. But whether it's attainable or not, it’s still refreshing to see four master fabric manipulators get their due. In this collab-happy fashion industry, where many partnerships just leave us confused (or worse, entirely unmoved), it’s worth celebrating a collaboration that didn’t even need each brand to touch for them to all turn out the strongest version of themselves. 

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