KENGO ARAI su misura

Kengo Arai is a young Neapolitan-trained tailor from Kanagawa who works under the name KENGO ARAI su misura. He came to tailoring all at once: after a university exchange in Mexico and a graduation with no plan, he decided on a long walk home one night to make suits, took a half-year sewing course in Japan — the Terakoya class run by Yukihiko Funabashi of Sartoria Ypsilon — and in 2018 flew to Naples with the one pair of trousers he had made, knocking on workshop doors until the first one he tried took him on as an unpaid apprentice. He stayed five years, most of them at Sartoria Solito, where he was trusted with every stage of a suit except the cutting, and came home in 2023 to set up on his own. He now cuts and sews from an atelier in the Yokohama area and takes orders at trunk shows in Tokyo held roughly every three months in Nakameguro with the vintage dealer Asset Vintage (Koichiro Makino), who also hosts fittings at his showroom between shows. The cut is soft, unpadded Neapolitan tailoring in the Solito line — shirt-sleeve shoulders, a lightly lowered gorge of his own — with a basted and a forward fitting before delivery. Prices at launch (late 2024): jackets from ¥250,000, suits from ¥300,000 and coats from ¥350,000 before tax, depending on cloth. Enquiries by Instagram message or email.