Shopping in Toyko

[SuE]

The Perfect Fit
(Shopping in Tokyo by David Sedaris)

Twice in 2014, I went to Tokyo with my sister Amy. I’d been seven times already, so was able to lead her to all the best places, by which I mean stores. When we returned in January of 2016, it made sense to bring our sister Gretchen with us. Hugh was there as well...

Normally in Tokyo we rent an apartment and stay for a week. This time, though, we got a whole house. The neighborhood it was in—Ebisu—is home to one of our favorite shops, Kapital. The clothes they sell are new but appear to have been previously worn, perhaps by someone who was shot or stabbed and then thrown off a boat. Everything looks as if it had been pulled from the evidence rack at a murder trial. I don’t know how they do it...

Then it was on to another one of our favorite places, the Tokyo outpost of the Dover Street Market. The original store, in London, sells both clothing and the kind of objects you might find in a natural-history museum. I got the inner ear of a whale there a few years back, and a four-horned antelope skull that was found in India in 1890.

The Ginza branch sticks to clothing and accessories. I’d gone with Amy on our first trip, in 2014, and left with a pair of wide-legged Paul Harnden trousers that come up to my nipples. The button-down fly is a foot long, and when rooting around in my pockets for change my forearms disappear all the way to the elbows. You can’t belt something that reaches that high up your torso, thus the suspenders, which came with the trousers and are beautiful, but, still, suspenders! Clown pants is what they are, artfully hand-stitched. Lined all the way to the ankle, but clown pants all the same. They cost as much as a MacBook Air, and I’d have walked away from them were it not for Amy saying, “Are you kidding? You have to get those...”

Do you often go shopping alone or with a s.o./friend/family?

[Faust]

This was hilarious - I love Sedaris's writing. I like shopping alone, personally, or going with like-minded people. Less distraction.

[monster]

semi serious

I had a good laugh reading this, strongly reminded me of myself wandering around Tokyo shops lost in some kind of shopaholic fever. Though I've never been to this place named Kapital and a friend of mine told me Sedaris goes over the top with hyperbole in his descriptions of the place, I assume it's on my list for the next trip to Japan. Well, that's what I call a well-made journalism...
And, yes, I used to shop alone ("obviously having some hole I was trying to fill"), but after I met my girlfriend who shares most of my tastes, we're out for shopping only together, and we're not only have different eyes or noses or things, we're not only from different countries, speaking different languages, we are also from different races, but every time we're out together anyone could tell we're strongly related, "no one belonged together more than us". That's a very special feeling and the moral here: passion for fashion unites

[Faust]

/\ that's very sweet :-)

I've seen a fair amount of Kapital, and it's kind of like Sedaris describes it.
One of H.Lorenzo's son brought the label to Los Angeles and made a store for them on Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach. Not sure if it's still there.

Obviously, Sedaris is hyperbolic for comedic effect, but he's not lying. Paul Harnden pants DO go up to your nipples!

[Icarium]

But are they artfully hand-stitched? ;p Whimsically perhaps.