The Enigmatic Legacy of Kosuke Tsumura and Final Home
While shopping in Tokyo's historic used book district, Jinboucho, I came across an intriguing issue of one of my absolute favorite fashion magazines, Mr Hi Fashion. Inside was a full feature on the creative director of one of Japan's most esoteric (and quite frankly bizarre) labels, Final Home.
Being a Japanese magazine, the interview text of course is fully in Japanese, but I felt it was an important task to scan and translate this interview; that being said, I'm sharing the full, translated text of the feature below, along with some images that accompanied it:
FINAL HOME. VISIBLE FUNCTION
Final Home's atelier interior and facade, located on Tokyo's Sumida River
FUTURE
Inside in the Air Net Building, nestled alongside Tokyo’s Sumida River, one can find Final Home’s atelier and studio. Sandwiched between a traditional Japanese reed store and a chain restaurant called Chochin-Ya, it feels like a step back in time. Nearby is the Shinohashi Bridge, and here the local speciality is Fukagawa-Don (clams and negi over rice). Interestingly, Japanese curry bread was also invented nearby.
At the entrance to the Air Net Building, untreated wood flooring with metal panels greets entrants. One at first might think this is a warehouse, or a loft in Soho, but on further inspection of the facade it is covered in old-fashion, Japanese lettering and signboards.
Arriving on the fourth floor, immaculate views of the Sumida River are visible; on the opposite side, a vista of the nearby expressway is dotted with oversized billboards and advertisements. The movie ‘Blade Runner’ comes to mind. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, this is one of Kousuke Tsumura (the chief designer of Final Home)’s favorite films.
As for the office interior, one might describe it as organized chaos. Sketchpads and drawings lay scattered next to convenience store food on office desks, while various maps and child-like sketches hang on the walls. A bookshelf nearby is filled with various catalogs for medical devices, self-help guides, legos and monographs by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
As a conceptual designer, Tsumura isn’t necessarily directly influenced by these surroundings, but he likes it here. There is a feeling of being shut out from the outside world, where Tsumura slowly has built up artifacts and creations to his own satisfaction. Despite fashion being something intrinsic to cities, the ideas he generates are not specific to any one place. On a desk, in an airplane, walking down the street..inspiration strikes anywhere. When searching for a new technique, Tsumura is more likely to turn on a movie, or thumb through various pieces of fabric. Even regular, every items seem to burst with inspiration.
Tsumura almost operates like a mechanical factory, taking in information like a machine; or, perhaps this absorption is more like a kid obsessed with his action figures, figuring himself to be a designer. As for the full garments and their details, they are brought together with extreme precision. Take the duffle coat for example – its hood and can be completely removed, in modular style. Or a pair of pants whose size can be totally modified via a zipper. For instance, the front of a garment may look happenstance, while a zipper on the rear allows the wearer to reverse it. One might also refer to a t-shirt constructed with tissue paper pockets.
The garments overall read as functional ones, but it would be hard to limit Final Home to something this simple. There are garments with hidden mechanisms inside, reminiscent of something out of a science fiction film from the 60s or 70s. Other pieces seems like the result of a scientific research project or a significant technological breakthrough. The result, more simply put, is something that feels like the pinnacle of technological advancement reconciling with design, form meeting function. Perhaps Final Home carries on the spirit of futuristic technical innovation that we see in the media of the 60s, when the future was still something visibly reached for.
Looking at the mix of futurism and Asian hi-tech aesthetics seen in Blade Runner, the looming turn of the century and Y2K moment isn’t completely bleak. The current age is quickly moving into the future, but we often don’t even notice. There may be some desperate urge to finally leap frog into the 21st century, but we can’t. For some, things like gardening and healing practices might be some type of manifested desire to slow down and even ‘stop’ this rapid passage of time.
If we asked a time traveller, they might say Final Home was a tool to outlast this inevitable descent into the future.
Shelves in the Final Home offices
HOME
The fabled image of a house, alone in nature, standing like some type of statue, is nothing more than an illusion. According to modern-day humans, now mostly living in apartment complexes, a house might merely be defined as a room with four walls. Similarly, going to the arcade, or into the subway, or a crowded shop somewhere, provides this same sensation. The only thing that actually differentiates these environments is the various props – housewares and decorations. In general, we just fill our personal spaces with our belongings anyways. Isn’t that what makes us most comfortable?
Tsumura’s intuition, that interior and exterior have become indistinguishable, is turning out to be more and more prescient. Since entering the second half of the 20th century, the function of the home has certainly changed. In contrast to a time when building a large home was a status symbol, we now live more alone, have a declining birth rate, and have smaller sized families than ever before. We live off fast food and avoid cooking and even eating at home. It seems we are arriving at the point where our housing is merely to have a roof over our head and to store our belongings. To truly break this down, we must look at the signature Final Home Jacket, a garment that best represent the time period Tsumura finds himself in.
Designing in the uncertain era of the turn of the century, Tsumura approached starting his label with a neutral, positive mindset. Protecting the wearer from the elements such as rain, cold, and sun is not the hard part; rather, its cultivating a peace of mind for the wearer, a sense of mental liberation, by carefully considering material, color, shape, and technique. Tsumura follows this mindset, leaving the final steps to the wearer himself. Like decorating a room, one considers what best to insert into a frontal pocket, and how to arrange various adjustable components, customizing the garment to one’s fulfillment. It’s almost as if Tsumura has left the garment only to be finished by the wearer, only completed once customized to their heart’s content.
At this summer’s Fuji Rock Festival, a piece from Final Home made an appearance. Borrowed to spend a night in the outdoors, it protected against the temperatures of both the night and early morning. Tsumura himself, carefully studying consumer goods in 1994, began testing the construction of a jacket that could protect against the depths of winter when camping or spending long periods outdoors. Tsumura did this not with data or secondary accounts, but rather by personally testing the garments himself, relying on his own senses and experience.
This jacket brings to mind the great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, where refugees and foreign residents in Kobe were forced to evacuate to outdoor safety zones and refugee centers. As for what these refugees might have filled their Final Home coat with (given the chance), one would hope it is their last remaining hopes and dreams, and the objects that represent them.
The Final Home coat, along with other signature pieces
NEW YORK
At his office, Tsumura keeps a Samurai sword; before that, he had a punching bag set up that he would regularly joust with. Somewhat surprisingly, Tsumura values machismo, and the masculine spirit of the Samurai. Perhaps despite this, he has liked fashion since he was just a child, making and sewing his own clothes since high school. And even now, he carries himself with the eager zeal of a toy-collecting obsessed child, and this comes through in his work.
Tsumura won Soen magazine’s prestigious ‘Soen Award’ as a self-educated designer; the following year, he joined the Issey Miyake design team, working as a collection assistant. He went on to launch his own unisex brand, FINAL HOME, in 1994. That same year, he began showing at both Paris fashion week and Tokyo fashion week, and went on to win the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix Newcomer Award. The following years, Tsumura would present dual presentations in both Paris and London, and his brand garnered significant attention in these markets.
Scanned runway images of Final Home's 1999 Fall-Winter collection
Gaining overseas attention strengthened Tsumura’s design acumen. The output was not only comprehensible by viewers and wearers of any level, but the garments were also executed at a highly technical level. The garments contain a strong sense of concept, but still, in a way, are made with Tsumura’s personal desires at their core. Tsumura plans to open his first overseas boutique in New York. In terms of location, he is considering Soho, a shopping Mecca, or Nolita, a more up and coming, cool destination.
In America, the country that birthed pop art and comics, it’s important that Tsumura’s creations come across clearly, and with immediacy. Tsumura doesn’t want to appeal merely to ‘foreign-ness’ overseas, but rather with technical prowess and impact. He is currently developing an outdoor lifestyle catalog, full of people who love inventions – a manifestation of the exact type of thing Tsumura truly values.
Tsumura recalls a foreign architect saying that his clothes ‘resemble kimono’. Japanese clothing is cut in straight lines, and has adjustable, modular ‘controls’ on the chest, waist, and arms. In terms of technique, I think it is safe to say that this surpasses simple notions of genre and classification.
Tsumura muses that moving forward, perhaps his next big challenge is to bridge the gap between ‘interior and exterior’. This might be chair cover with various pockets attached, or a giant pocket spread to attach to a wall. This bridge, between home and self, interior and exterior, is Tsumura’s passion.
-END
New York Times press clipping for Final Home's NYC boutique
NOTES
The NYC Final Home boutique opened in September 1999 at 241 Lafayette street in Nolita, Manhattan. The space used to be occupied by the famed Liquid Sky storefront, a clothing and record store catering to the jungle and rave music scene. Tsumura continued to stock these records in the store, in the spirit of continuity. The boutique would unfortunately close sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s.
The Air Net building, as seen in 2024