How Japan Cornered the Market on Retro Canvas Sneakers

Leather sneakers have become a staple of the modern man&#;s wardrobe, occupying closet space once reserved for dress shoes. But decades before anyone was lacing up a Common Projects Achilles&#;or one of its innumerable imitators&#;to pair with a suede bomber jacket and tapered joggers, college students were mixing canvas trainers in with their blue blazers and chinos. Like most items to enter the Ivy canon, the canvas sneaker wasn&#;t adopted as a conscious style choice but was simply what students reached for as they hastily dressed for class.

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 &#;Casual Ivy style as worn by college students was always a mix of whatever they had in their wardrobe&#;or their friend&#;s wardrobe. Often a mix of high and low,&#; says Robert Squillaro, who serves as the merchandising director of classic campus outfitter J. Press. &#;Sneakers during the Ivy heyday were classic in style and made in canvas, usually white or black. This style is timeless, although now mostly worn casually and not for athletics.&#;

Japan&#;s Shoes Like Pottery makes these hi-tops for Seattle&#;s Blue Owl Workshop.

Blue Owl Workshop

Mud-splashed canvas sneakers, often paired with madras shorts and wrinkled oxford shirts, turn up frequently in the photo book Take Ivy, which is widely credited with exporting the Ivy League look to Japan. In a sartorial case of things coming full circle, J. Press now sells the MoonStar Gym Classic, a Japanese-made white canvas sneaker.

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&#;We went with MoonStar for the classic style, the quality of the make, and the fact that they are not overexposed here in the U.S.,&#; Squillaro says of the under-the-radar brand. &#;We consider them the best of the Japanese retro-style sneakers.&#;

If there&#;s a market for vintage-inspired canvas sneakers, Japan has it cornered. And its epicenter is the city of Kurume, where the related brands of MoonStar, Shoes Like Pottery, and Doek are all created in the same historic factory.

The original pair of U.S. Navy shoes that inspired Doek&#;s Japanese-made canvas sneakers sold by Sweden&#;s Rubato.

Rubato/IG User @Leigh_Archive

MoonStar itself traces its roots back to and is today one of only three factories in Japan capable of making sneakers via the traditional ka-ryu process of vulcanization, a labor-intensive method that better fuses the upper to the sole. At the start of the 21st century, MoonStar was mostly producing children&#;s styles and orthopedics, until it launched the fashion-conscious brand Shoes Like Pottery. So-named because of the similarities between its heat-based vulcanization process and the way that ceramics are finished, the cleanly designed sneakers are prized by specialty retailers like Seattle&#;s Blue Owl Workshop, which stocks its own exclusive collaborations with the brand.

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&#;The old-world manufacturing process is on par with what you&#;d find in a pair of Japanese selvedge denim or a loop wheel sweatshirt, and they age just as well,&#; says Logan Kegley, who serves as Blue Owl Workshop&#;s marketing manager. &#;We actually think the shoes look better with a little bit of wear on them, just like a good pair of jeans.&#;

Shuji Koda, a 35-year-old veteran of the Japanese clothing industry and owner of the apparel group GoodWeaver, consulted on the creation of Shoes Like Pottery and became its sole domestic agent in . In Koda launched Doek, which takes its name from the Dutch word for &#;cloth&#; and makes vulcanized sneakers at the MoonStar factory using hard-wearing kasuri canvas woven on vintage looms. 

Britain&#;s Drake&#;s also turns to Doek for these canvas CVOs, which come in four colors.

Drake&#;s

Doek has since found admirers among Western designers, and today produces a range of classically styled &#;oxford&#;, or tennis sneakers for the Ivy-adjacent British label Drake&#;s. Another recent collaborator has been Sweden&#;s Rubato, which partnered with Doek to design an ecru-colored oxford with an indigo rubber bottom inspired by a vintage pair of U.S. Navy deck shoes.

&#;We feel that Doek has a very similar philosophy to us,&#; Rubato co-founder Oliver Dannefalk says of the partnership. &#;The materials are excellent, and they are hand-vulcanized so they age with grace, just as we want the Rubato products to do.&#;

Yes, the canvas sneaker may have humble origins, which remains a key part of its laidback appeal. But as this trio of closely related Japanese labels attests, even the simplest of styles can be a showcase for craft&#;and deserving of a spot in your summer rotation.

Authors

• Eric Twardzik

  Eric Twardzik is a Boston-based freelance writer with a passion for classic menswear and classic cocktails. He has a deep reverence for things that get better with age, such as tweed jackets and&#;

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Sneaker brands love to introduce us to the latest advancements in the footwear world. If you compare some of the shoes out there these days you&#;ll notice the big brands are engaged in a technological arms race in a quest for sneaker world domination. In recognition of the pioneering spirit we&#;ve decided to break down some of these features, week by week, in our new series. Each edition will talk about some teched out aspect of the sneaker game, new and old, to help build a bigger picture of what goes on behind the mesh curtain of the industry.

It can be easy to overlook traditional materials in the footwear industry &#; we often take them for granted because they&#;ve just sort of &#; been there. Instead, we get carried away by waves of , which fade away as soon as an updated version appears on the shelves. There&#;s one particular building block of the sneaker that has been around for longer than the rest, it stretches back to days before the sneaker industry emerged &#; longer than any industry, in fact. It&#;s played a part in shaping global trade, capitalism and manufacturing. There aren&#;t many materials that can claim to have had a bigger impact on the world than cotton.

Cotton is a fluffy white fibre that grows in a boll &#; or pod &#; around the seeds of the cotton plant, each boll can contain up to 250,000 individual fibres. People have been spinning cotton fibres into yarn, and then weaving it into fabric for a little over 6,000 years. Cotton plants are native to warmer climates so it wasn&#;t until people started travelling long distances until the rest of the world started to notice it. Once Europeans discovered the cloth it became a precious commodity, cold European cities could only produce , shorn from sheep, and linen, which is woven from flax fibres. It was a common belief around Europe that cotton plants looked something like a lamb sprouting from a giant flower. Cotton offered plenty of properties that the native didn&#;t, it was comfortable next to the skin, strong, easy to clean and held coloured well. Once Da Gama made his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope in he proved that it was possible to sail to the Indies, rather than travel overland &#; European nations could suddenly get more cotton, transport it faster and cheaper. The East India Company was set up in to make the most of the recently discovered trading routes and soon cotton became one of their main commodities.

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