“I really love my parents,” says Kota Gushiken from his Tokyo studio. “But they were very strict and traditional. I didn’t like that as a teenager, and it made me want to do creative things in a super free way.” Even now, at 33, Gushiken doesn’t like being told what to do. “I just hate to feel restricted. I need a sense of total freedom in every aspect of my life.”
Since launching his eponymous label in 2019, Gushiken has made that existential need his signature. His weird but wearable clothes seem to defy nearly every rule and convention in the world of knitwear. “I like knitwear so much,” he says, “precisely because there’s freedom in every element, from the yarns and the way threads are combined to knitting techniques, patterns, textures, colors, and design.”
Some of his pieces feature irregular stitch patterns, hand-crocheted objects, big holes, slouching shoulders, drooping hems, and loose threads deliberately left dangling. Others use over-twisted, fluffy, slubbed, or uneven yarns in bright, popping colors often achieved from unusual dyes. For Spring/Summer 2026, he turned an CWU-36P bomber into a knitwear showpiece, with the typical bright orange lining visible through the exterior.
Not that Gushiken doesn’t know the rules and conventions of knitwear. It’s true that right before entering the knitwear program at Central Saint Martins in London, he couldn’t tell the difference between knitted and woven fabrics. Once there, however, he began experimenting with a simple domestic Brother knitting machine – discontinued in the 1990s – and immediately knew he had found his medium. “Back then, the only thing I had were vague ideas in my head. It was when I started knitting that I realized I could turn these ideas into something real with my own hands.”
While still at college, Gushiken gained luxury-fashion experience in the knitwear departments of Christian Dior, Proenza Schouler, and Christian Wijnants. After graduating in 2016, he was approached by Isetan, the Japanese department store with a flagship in Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku district, to create a new collection. He said yes, and spent the next year developing his Fall/Winter 2017 debut, built around colorful reinterpretations of the traditional Japanese kappogi, or apron.
After an opening at an emerging Chinese brand fell through, Gushiken decided to strike out on his own. “I was practically broke,” he says, “so I took on a day job as I worked on my next collection [Fall/Winter 2019].” It was the first time he didn’t knit everything himself, instead producing the pieces with a factory in Japan. Rather than limiting his creative freedom, the shift greatly expanded it. “I realized that, freed from my own technical limitations, I could take my design ideas even further.” A case in point: intarsia, a knitting technique he often adopts because it allows boldly colored patterns to be “drawn” straight into the fabric, rather than layering them on top.
At other times, it is Gushiken who pushes the boundaries for the professional knitters he works with. “Sometimes when I come up with an idea, they say, ‘No, no, that’s impossible! But maybe if we combine different techniques, what you’re proposing could work.’ And then they just give it a try.”
Something similar happened during his ongoing collaboration with Jamieson’s of Scotland, the family-owned knitwear company in business since the 1890s. Gushiken has created several pieces using their renowned Shetland wool. One is the “Reverse Stitch Fair Isle” jumper, where the seams are exposed for an “inside-out” effect. Another is the “Jumper-ish Scarf,” a hybrid piece that can either be worn as a cropped sweater or wrapped around the neck, thanks to one sleeve left unsewn. “When the people at Jamieson’s first saw the designs, they were like, ‘What the hell is he doing?’,” says Gushiken. “Luckily, they did like the final result.”
It’s characteristic of the playful, humorous approach he takes to knitwear. Each collection is rooted in his daily life, with pieces often literally depicting random experiences. A fluffy mohair cardigan from Fall/Winter 2024 features a monkey on the back, taken from an image he once spotted on a beer poster in a pub in Niigata. Two other jumpers depict Mount Fuji as he saw it from his window at dusk and at night on January 1, 2022.
This light-heartedness is evident even in collection titles like “Is This the Debut?” (Fall/Winter 2019), “Ridiculously Serious” (Spring/Summer 2022) and “Orgnaseid WeIl” [sic] (Fall/Winter 2024). The latter was presented not on a traditional runway but as a stand-up show performed by two Japanese comedians during Tokyo Fashion Week in 2024, which had been made possible by the funding received from the Tokyo Fashion Award he won earlier that year.
The prize, aimed at supporting Tokyo-based designers and helping them expand internationally, also took Gushiken to Paris Fashion Week. Last January, he presented his Fall/Winter 2026 collection there, which may well mark his next step outside Japan, where his work is still primarily stocked at boutiques like TABAYA United Arrows, talklein and +81. It also expands his range, which is already growing to include woven, rather than knitted pieces, like a pair of denim trousers with crocheted details at the coin and back pockets. The new collection is inspired by a chance encounter with a Hindu monk during a trip to Bali. “He told me to flow my mind, but don’t follow my mind,” Gushiken recalls. “Back in Tokyo, I told my British acupuncture guy about it, and he said the monk was probably referring to the concept of mui – meaning that if you want to achieve something, you shouldn’t try to control it.”
The concept proved apt for shaping several core pieces in the collection. One of them is a cotton cable-knit jumper. “When I visited a dyeing factory in central Japan, I saw a craftsman there about my age. He was working on what he called a ‘failed experiment,’ mixing different tones together. When I asked how he had done it, he said something that made no sense to me at all: ‘I bleached and dyed it at the same time.’” Gushiken immediately decided he wanted to use the technique. Because the resulting color shifts depending on temperature and humidity, the final pieces, produced in summer, will look nothing like the samples, which were done in winter.
“This kind of uncontrollability is exactly what I was after,” says Gushiken, before adding with a laugh, “although knowing what I’m after might not be very mui.”
