Asoke is a wedding fabric, a traditional fabric. Nobody had ever asked it to be streetwear before, and until this collection I'd only let it appear in a piece or two of my own work, never a whole line.
For Street Culture, I built a full collection around it: Asoke stitched into ripped, distressed pants alongside combat-inspired silhouettes, a fabric known for aso-ebi rooms sitting next to rugged, streetwear cuts.
We shot the campaign, and that's when the fear actually arrived. Not before, during. I looked at the images and started talking myself out of the whole release. This fabric belonged to something else, something more traditional, and I wasn't sure people would let it be reinterpreted this hard.
I called a friend to tell him I was pulling it. He didn't understand the question. "What do you mean? The collection is amazing." He said it so plainly that canceling stopped sounding like an option.
So I put it out.
Street Culture ended up changing the direction of the brand more than any collection before it. It's the reason Andrew Tabitha became known for turning Asoke into something contemporary instead of only ceremonial. The ripped pants from that collection are still the piece people react to first when they come across the brand, the same pants I almost never let anyone see.