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Two by Design
In Tokyo, a Couple Proving That Good Craftsmanship Knows No Boundaries
She’s a Swedish accessories designer. He’s the founder of a street wear brand. Sophia and Masafumi Watanabe have opposing design sensibilities, but are creatively intertwined.
“IT IS THREADS, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years,” the French actress Simone Signoret once said of marriage, and for Sophia and Masafumi Watanabe, this is especially true. Masafumi is the founder of the popular Japanese street wear brand Bedwin and the Heartbreakers; his wife is the creator of Sophia 203, a Jaipur-based line of embroidered accessories. The couple has been together for eight years and married for nearly four. They live with their 1- and 4-year-old children in a modest, sparsely furnished three-bedroom apartment in central Tokyo’s expat-heavy Moto-Azabu district, traveling every other weekend to their beach house in Hayama, a quiet seaside getaway an hour outside of Tokyo where the Japanese imperial family has long maintained a home. “My husband makes street wear, and I do something handcrafted,” Sophia says. “He’s got a big clothing line and I have a small business, but despite that, we really do influence each other.”
The pair met at a Tokyo nightclub in 2007, then ran into each other again by chance at the same spot a year later (Masafumi lost Sophia’s business card the first time around) and began dating. “She’s from Sweden and lived in India and I’m from Tokyo,” Masafumi explains. “English isn’t my mother tongue, and she speaks it well. Nobody believed we were going to make it.” Sophia, 34, was raised in a bourgeois family in Stockholm. She had plans to go to law school, but at 18, she was hired in Paris as an au pair by the French jewelry designer Marie-Hélène de Taillac, who is known for her colorful gemstone pieces handmade by craftsmen in India using 17th-century methods. Three years later, she moved to Jaipur to become de Taillac’s creative assistant. “My job was basically to choose the stones and, most importantly, the color combinations in each piece,” she says. Masafumi, 47, grew up on the streets of Tokyo as, he says, “a downtown boy, hustling,” hanging out and consuming the ’80s and ’90s British and American music, magazines and movies that would form the DNA of his label.
If geography is destiny, it’s hardly surprising that their aesthetics are wildly divergent: Sophia describes hers as “very, very, very feminine and dressy,” whereas Masafumi’s is more casual and urban. Bedwin and the Heartbreakers riffs on American pop culture with street-savvy staples (jeans, varsity jackets, duffle coats) made almost exclusively in Japan. The line can be found in roughly 50 stores there, including at his new shop in Tokyo’s fashionable Sendagaya district, as well as in boutiques everywhere from Amsterdam to Brooklyn to Boston.
Sophia’s embroidery — done with ancient techniques called aari and zardozi, which are practiced only by male artisans in Rajasthan and mostly used on costumes for religious ceremonies — adorns everything from necklaces to pillows to clutches and features intricately stitched flora and fauna, like poppies or butterflies, in bright shades of coral, turquoise and pink. Often inspired by works of art (a recent collection was based on the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois), Sophia’s creations take hours of handcrafting and have the rich, inimitable feel of vintage heirlooms. She begins by sketching her designs, including the color placement of every thread, after which her artisans make a sample. The line can be found at the cult Parisian shop Arlette, at Ecru in Kuwait City and at several stores in Tokyo, including Isetan and Super A Market. Sophia also creates accessories for museum gift shops, often to complement exhibitions; most recently, she designed pouches, necklaces and brooches for the Christian Dior retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
IN 2013, THE COUPLE got engaged, despite still living 6,000 miles apart. “I never thought we would live in the same country because I respect her job and wanted to support her work,” Masafumi says. But when Sophia found out she was pregnant two months later, she decided to move from Jaipur, where she had lived for more than eight years, to Tokyo.
Like a pair of trees growing in proximity, their roots have since become deeply intertwined. The city’s relaxed urban style — and her husband’s brand, which channels it — have altered Sophia’s own sartorial choices. “I don’t think I’d worn sneakers since I was 14 before I moved here,” she says. Her love of dressing up — in Jaipur, where she rented a 1930s mansion that was the former residence of a deposed prince, she gravitated to long, flowing dresses with sandals or heels — has transformed her husband’s taste as well. He’s begun incorporating more luxurious fabrics into his Bedwin line, rendering a navy pea coat in velvet ink or a college cardigan in a delicate silk-wool blend. Last year, he also launched A Socialist, a small secondary label (inspired by his late father, a politician with socialist leanings) of elevated specialty items like tuxedos and dress shirts, which Sophia wears herself. The couple has plans to collaborate more formally on an upcoming collection for Masafumi’s Bedwin Girls line, which includes hooded pullovers, corduroy pants and shirtdresses in bandanna prints and army-green military fabric.
Although Sophia runs her line from home, and Masafumi’s office is above his store (a 15-minute bike ride away), they make it a priority to have breakfast or dinner together every day, when they discuss each other’s work. He gives an example: “She doesn’t like baggy pants; she likes tight jeans. I think, ‘No, this is street fashion, but maybe I can make something a little slimmer?’ And then I got really good orders.”
Of course, like any couple — especially one composed of two unyielding artists sharing a living space — they don’t always agree. Masafumi is laid-back in ways Sophia is not (she’s fussy about place mats, cloth napkins and sit-down meals), and he’s persnickety in ways she finds ridiculous (he dry cleans his socks). He prefers industrial loftlike spaces, whereas she likes furniture that’s as sophisticated and formal as her clothing, like the Vitra sofa she had shipped from Stockholm. But they find beauty in their differences. “Her feedback makes things richer,” says Masafumi. “She invades my universe, and that makes my creations more unique.”
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