Uruh
CONVERSATION WITH
MS. Ohmori (Designer) and MS. Matsuyama (Co-Founder)
WRITTEN BY
Geoffrey Guyonnet
Chapter 1
A BRAND BORN ON A FACTORY FLOOR
The designer, Kanako Ohmori, had spent most of her career inside the apparel industry — fashion school in Kyoto, an autodidactic time in London (an internship at Vivienne Westwood's son's label Child of Jago, hand-stitch work for a Japanese tailor on Savile Row preparing an ITS competition collection), then back in Tokyo for the fabric planning team at one of Japan's globally recognized fashion brands, then a four-year run co-leading an in-house mode label inside a larger group.
By that time, Ohmori had been making "Made in Japan" garments for years without ever knowing the names of the mills behind the fabrics. The chain still passed through OEMs, swatch books, and unnamed mills. The maker was somewhere at the end of it, invisible.
The shift came through her future co-founder, Matsuyama, who had moved from apparel into regional revitalization work, including a three-year posting with the city of Kobe. That role took Matsuyama into small Japanese mills regularly. One day she suggested a visit to a husband-and-wife mill in Nishiwaki.
What Ohmori found there changed the question. She saw the loom for the first time. She saw the techniques behind fabrics she had used for years. She saw stacks of jacquards being produced — under absolute confidentiality — for major luxury houses. The makers were unable to put their own name on what they made.
URUH started from that gap. A label whose explicit purpose is to make those mills, and the way they work, visible.
Chapter 2
WHY CLOTHING, AND WHY UNDER THIS NAME
The leap second is the strangest reference point. To keep clocks aligned with the earth's rotation, the world occasionally adds a single extra second: 23:59:60 before 24:00:00. A second that should not exist, inserted because something doesn't quite fit.
Ohmori has been drawn to that kind of space her whole life. Things that are uncertain, in-between, undefined enough that every person sees them differently. In her words, the puzzle piece that doesn't belong to anyone, dropped in to fill a gap nobody else noticed.
Clothing felt like the right medium for that. Garments are worn close to the body, accumulating a person's days. They are constantly read by other people, and constantly re-read by the person wearing them. Whatever ambiguity the designer holds in her head ends up traveling on someone else's shoulders.
The brand's current collection makes the idea visible in the product names themselves — INTERSTICE Slit Shirts, MAZE Cocoon Pants, INORGANIC Flared Pants, NO SILHOUETTE Shirts. The vocabulary is not decorative. It is the brand's actual subject.
Chapter 3
A FASHION LABEL AS A COLLABORATION WITH MILLS
Officially, URUH is a small Tokyo fashion label. In practice, the founders describe their work less as design-then-sourcing and more as an ongoing collaboration with a network of Japanese weaving and dyeing workshops.
Ohmori usually begins from a feeling — a concept, a hand-drawn illustration, something emotional she wants to translate into cloth. She brings that to the mills, and the conversation goes the other way around. The craftsmen suggest techniques that might carry the feeling. One example she gave: she had originally wanted to use opal fabric, whose production can require heavy water use and chemical processing; an artisan proposed Gisha-ori (擬紗織り), a mesh-style weave traditionally used for summer kimono, as a more sustainable way to reach a similar visual.
That kind of back-and-forth shapes most of the collection. The designer brings a mood. The mill brings a memory of how cloth has been made for centuries. The piece comes out of the meeting of those two languages.
That is also why URUH refuses to lead its international story with "Japanese craftsmanship." For Ohmori, that framing flattens the work. The story is the brand's own — the in-between, the uncertain — and the fact that Japanese makers share the same attention is what allows the story to take physical form.
Chapter 4
WHAT URUH MEANS BY QUALITY
In conversation, Ohmori comes back to a comparison she clearly thinks about often: each URUH garment, she says, is like a novel. The wearer spends time with it. They read it slowly. Over months and years, the piece accumulates meaning that no summary could ever reproduce.
Asking a chatbot to summarize a novel, she notes, gives you the plot — but not what the book becomes when you live with it.
That comparison is more than a metaphor. It governs how the label is built. Production volumes are deliberately small. Each piece is intended to carry its own internal story — the mill that wove the fabric, the craftsman who tied the dye, the conversation that gave it its shape. The wearer is meant to know that story, or at least to sense it.
It also reframes the marketing question. URUH is not trying to be discovered by as many people as possible. It is trying to build long relationships with a smaller number of people who choose to spend time with the work.
Chapter 5
WHERE TRADITIONAL WEAVING MEETS A CONTEMPORARY SILHOUETTE
URUH leans heavily on textiles from Japan's traditional weaving regions, but the silhouettes are unmistakably contemporary.
The clearest example is Gisha-ori (擬紗織り), the mesh-style weave traditionally used to keep summer kimono breathable. In URUH's hands, that same fabric is built into a one-piece dress rather than a kimono. The weave keeps its heritage cooling and lightness; the cut places it in a contemporary wardrobe.
Buttons follow the same logic. URUH commissions custom buttons in nara (Japanese oak), made for the collection rather than picked from a catalog. Each one has an origin, a maker, a story.
What Ohmori finds most compelling about traditional weaving is not its prettiness but its embedded thought. A jacquard weave that looks simple from a distance is, up close, the result of decisions about every single warp and weft thread, taken by someone with decades of experience. She is open about not being against new technologies — 3D printing, machine production — but for her, hand-weaving carries a kind of human density that recent methods cannot yet match.
Chapter 6
THE PROCESS BEHIND URUH
STEP 1 | STARTING FROM AN EMOTION
Each collection begins with a concept and a set of hand-drawn illustrations. Ohmori works from a feeling or an image before any fabric is chosen.
STEP 2 | THE CONVERSATION WITH THE MILL
The illustrations and the mood are brought to URUH's network of partner mills. The artisans respond with technique proposals — a particular weave, a particular dye method — that could translate the brief into cloth.
STEP 3 | WEAVING OR DYEING THE FABRIC
The chosen technique is produced at the mill: jacquard, Gisha-ori mesh weave, tied-dot dyeing (tenzuri-zome), or others depending on the collection. Each method carries its own pace; tied-dot dyeing in particular has to be done piece by piece, by hand.
STEP 4 | CUTTING THE SILHOUETTE
URUH cuts the fabric into silhouettes that pull the textile away from its original context. A kimono fabric becomes a fitted dress. A traditional weave becomes a cocoon pant.
STEP 5 | DETAILS BUILT FOR LONG WEAR
Custom buttons, replaceable collars and cuffs, finishes that allow the garment to be repaired or refreshed over years. The piece is built to be lived in, not consumed.
Chapter 7
SLOW IS NOT THE POINT TRACEABILITY IS
Traditional methods are not built for efficiency. URUH does not pretend otherwise. Deadlines slip when an artisan's body needs rest. Patterns vary from piece to piece. Production cannot be rushed.
But for Ohmori, slowness is not the value the brand is trying to defend. The real value is traceability. URUH is built so that, for every piece, the wearer can know which mill wove the fabric, which artisan tied the dye, which workshop turned the wood for the buttons.
That posture happens to align almost perfectly with the European Union's incoming Digital Product Passport regulation, set to become mandatory in 2027. The DPP will require brands to disclose, per item, where each component was made and how it can be repaired or recycled. For most of the apparel industry that means assembling information across opaque OEM chains. For URUH, the information already exists by design.
In a market where most brands will scramble to meet the new rule, URUH was effectively built for it five years early.
Chapter 8
SUSTAINABILITY, REDEFINED
URUH's sustainability position is unusual for a brand of its size. It does not lead with single-material certifications.
Instead, the founders frame durability through a simple test: how long does the wearer keep the piece in active rotation? The label is therefore built around shirts that can be worn year-round, around replaceable components for the parts that wear first (collars, cuffs), and around partial use of cupra and recycled polyester where it makes sense.
When dyeing is involved, the brand uses techniques that produce less water and chemical waste — for example, replacing opal fabric (which can require heavy water use and chemical processing) with the Gisha-ori weave when the goal is a similar visual.
The deeper bet is on the wearer. A garment that the buyer comes to think of as theirs — a piece with a story they know, made by people they could name — is a garment that tends to stay in use far longer than statistical averages predict.
Chapter 9
JAPAN, AS PART OF THE STORY NOT AS THE PITCH
The founders are clear about how they want URUH read outside Japan.
They have noticed something many Japanese brands also report: in Europe in particular, customers tend to listen for the who, the why, and the how before they look at the object. The story is the point of entry. In Japan, by contrast, products often lead with what — function, precision, specifications.
URUH is built for the first kind of attention. The brand's actual subject is its philosophical concept — the leap second, the in-between space — and the way Ohmori turns that idea into garments. The Japanese fabrics, the heritage techniques, the named workshops: these are part of the story, not the headline. Made-in-Japan, in their view, is no longer a sufficient pitch on its own.
HONMO.
NOTES
What stayed with us after the conversation was how consistently Kanako Ohmori returned to the same image. Clothing as a novel. The wearer as a reader. The piece accumulating meaning over time, the way a book does when you live with it.
Underneath the literary metaphor, the label is unusually well structured. URUH's design process actually starts at the mill, with a conversation rather than a brief. Its sustainability strategy is built on long use rather than single-material claims. Its supply chain is naturally compatible with regulations the rest of the industry is still preparing for.
It is rare to find a fashion label that is at once this philosophical and this practical. URUH belongs to a quiet group of Japanese brands that no longer want to sell Japan as a label, but are willing to spend years bringing the invisible parts of Japanese making — the mills, the artisans, the techniques — into the open. The work feels closer to a long argument than to a collection.
The wearer, in their telling, is the person finishing that argument by choosing to keep the garment in their life.