The Journal — Artist Collaboration

Yoshitaka Amano is one of the most influential visual artists of the 20th century — a Japanese illustrator and painter who helped define the visual language of anime in the 1970s, who created the iconic character designs for the Final Fantasy video game series beginning in 1987, and whose fine art work has been exhibited internationally for decades. His imagery is immediately recognizable: fluid figures, layered color, a fantasy universe that exists between the human and the elemental. His hand is among the most distinctively legible in contemporary illustration.

The collaboration between a tailor and an artist is not obvious. Tailoring is a craft of precision and restraint — the suit that calls attention to itself is, by most definitions, failing at its job. Art, at its most interesting, calls attention to itself and to the ideas behind it. These two disciplines seem to pull in opposite directions.

A Vestium NY suit — designed and fitted at 315 Fifth Avenue, crafted by European master tailors — has been worn to board meetings in London, to gallery openings in Berlin, to a wedding in Capri, to a court hearing in Washington, to a dinner in Tokyo. The pattern stays in New York; the garment goes wherever the person who commissioned it goes. This is one of the specific pleasures of a well-made tailored piece — it belongs to the person, not to a place.

"Zero waste" has become a marketing term — applied to brands that use recycled packaging, that donate unsold inventory, that calculate and offset their carbon footprint, that add organic cotton to their supply chain. These are not meaningless efforts, but they are not zero waste. They are waste reduction within a system that is structurally built to produce waste.