Japan ★

Learning a foreign craft

Western dress came to Japan with the Meiji Restoration, as official policy rather than fashion. There was no inherited way of cutting a coat, so the trade was learned from books, from foreign tailors, and, from the 1980s onwards, by young Japanese makers apprenticing in Florence, Naples, Vienna and London and then coming home.

That route produces a particular kind of maker: technically exacting, unusually faithful to whichever tradition they trained in, and inclined to treat the method as a discipline rather than a habit. Yohei Fukuda's shoes are English in method and finished to a standard few English workshops attempt; a Japanese tailor trained in Florence will often make a more orthodox Florentine coat than a Florentine will.

Shoemaking

Japanese bespoke shoemaking is the clearest case. A generation of makers (Fukuda, Hiro Yanagimachi, Eiji Murata and others) built a trade in Tokyo from nothing in about thirty years, and the international shoemaking competitions of the last decade have been dominated by Japanese entrants.

The house style, to the extent there is one, favours a close, sculpted waist, extremely fine hand welting and a level of finish that reads as restrained rather than showy.