Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance

This year’s Super Bowl was largely forgettable as an athletic contest, but it lives on in fashion history thanks to Kendrick Lamar, who presided over the halftime show in black leather gloves, a varsity jacket, and a pair of bleached-out, quad-accentuating low-rise denim flares. Fashion commentators declared that Lamar had achieved the impossible—reviving a style of pants widely believed to be lost to time and the liquidation of Wet Seal. Searches for “flared jeans” soared by five thousand per cent following the performance. The Cut declared that the pants, a twelve-hundred-dollar design from Celine, “stole the show.”

Lamar’s backup dancers wore red, blue, and white casual wear. One commentator theorized that they represented American gangs—the Bloods, the Crips, and the Ku Klux Klan. Others saw references to prison jumpsuits, or even to “the sperm guys in that Woody Allen movie.” (More prosaically, the dancers formed the shape of an American flag.) The costumes were the perfect nondescript counterpoint to Lamar’s trend-launching look. One would have been hard pressed to identify them until Uniqlo piped up on social media, claiming some of the white tops as its “Uniqlo U AIRism Cotton Oversized” T-shirts.

Uniqlo is a clothing company based in Tokyo. It was founded, in 1984, by Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. Last year, Fast Retailing—the holding company that controls Uniqlo—had its best year ever, generating close to twenty billion dollars in revenue and three billion dollars in profit. It has become the world’s third-largest apparel manufacturer and retailer, trailing only H&M and Inditex, the parent company of Zara, although Fast Retailing is growing more rapidly than both of them. The company’s annual report declares that “the ultimate goal is to become the best-loved, No. 1 brand among customers worldwide.”

In April, Uniqlo’s humble mid-calf sock, which costs less than four dollars a pair, ranked eighth on Lyst’s quarterly index of fashion’s “hottest products”—the most affordable item ever to appear on the list. “The colors are exactly right and it’s inexpensive, but you feel like you’re not necessarily exploiting a seven-year-old in Bangladesh to get it,” Tariro Makoni, who writes the newsletter Trademarked, told me. “Uniqlo is kind of like Everlane without the moral superiority and H&M without the ickiness.”

Mothers are as likely to wear Uniqlo as their daughters, or, for that matter, their spouses or grandchildren. Fashion people snap up Uniqlo collaborations with luxury brands such as JW Anderson and Lemaire, while normies know that they can find the same UV-protective jackets there year after year. Even royals apparently appreciate the brand’s combination of understated style and conspicuous thrift. This spring, when Meghan Markle launched a ShopMy page, providing affiliate links to “a handpicked and curated collection of the things I love,” she included the company’s cotton trenchcoat. One of Bad Bunny’s stylists, meanwhile, recently told the L.A. Times in an interview that his favorite look he has created for the musician involved a red jacket, purchased at a Puerto Rico mall, and Uniqlo pants. It was an inadvertent moment of unibare—a Japanese word for the moment when someone realizes you’re wearing Uniqlo and not a more expensive brand. “I could have sworn it was designer,” the interviewer gushed about the look. “My mind is blown.”

Uniqlo is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any life style or aesthetic. “You can kind of project your own reality onto Uniqlo,” Laura Reilly, who writes the newsletter Magasin, said. The clothes are not exactly forgettable, but they possess a simplicity that can verge on self-effacement. “We don’t expect or even want that our customer would wear head-to-toe Uniqlo,” Gary Conway, a member of the company’s communications team, told me when I visited the brand’s Tokyo headquarters this spring. Yanai—universally referred to within Uniqlo as Mr. Yanai, in the style of a Mr. Sinatra or a Mrs. Prada—has said, “We believe that individuality comes not from clothes, but the people wearing them.”

You will never see a logo on a Uniqlo garment. Nor a sequin or a ruffle. “No lace,” Uniqlo’s creative director, Clare Waight Keller, told me. “Not even an asymmetrical neckline.” Waight Keller joined Uniqlo last year, after leading European luxury houses including Chloé and Givenchy. “The Zaras and COSes and H&Ms of the world, their whole sort of ambition is to be fashion,” she said. “Uniqlo is much more about a sense of timelessness.” Elizabeth Paton, the fashion editor of the Financial Times, told me, “Uniqlo is one of the few brands that has this global stranglehold on consumer culture.” She continued, “They’re equipping people in everything you can see, and everything you can’t see, even the underlayers. They’re offering that everyday, every-possible-solution approach, the way that IKEA did for the home.”

Uniqlo has more than twenty-five hundred stores in Asia, Europe, and North America. One in four Japanese people is said to own a Uniqlo puffer jacket. “People think of Uniqlo like Toyota or Sony,” Kaoru Imajo, the director of the Japan Fashion Week Organization, told me. “Yes, they make clothes, but it’s bigger than that.” A popular recent TikTok video showed a young guy in Singapore picking up the same Uniqlo AIRism T-shirt in eight different colors. (The shirt is made of a proprietary blend that purportedly wicks sweat so that wearers “don’t need to worry about odors.”) Uniqlo responded to the excitement by releasing three Singapore-exclusive hues, at which point the country’s biggest newspaper anointed the T-shirt as the “national uniform.”

The ecological implications of manufacturing at this scale are staggering. Uniqlo won’t say how many pieces it produces annually, but more than a decade ago, when the company had less than half the stores it has now, it boasted of producing six hundred million items a year. Executives strenuously object to the notion that Uniqlo is fast fashion, citing improvements in manufacturing and pointing out that their garments are “emotionally sustainable,” remaining desirable for years. Uniqlo offers far fewer styles than its competitors—around six thousand a year, compared with Zara’s nine thousand and Shein’s hundred and sixty-five thousand, according to one study. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental conflict between the company’s goal of continual expansion and its gestures toward sustainability: it’s not the shelf life of Uniqlo’s garments that poses environmental problems so much as it is the number of shelves.

The company insists that the more people who wear Uniqlo, the better the world will be. It calls its clothing LifeWear—“clothing that improves people’s lives,” “a link between our world and the next generation,” and “where art and science meet.” Numerous people at Uniqlo attempted to explain the LifeWear concept to me, but the more they did the less I understood. What was clear is that Uniqlo conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values, replete with mantras and koans, as much as a clothing company. Uniqlo, Yanai told me, “is Made for All. Therefore, we must strive to be relevant and loved by everyone around the world.” The brand’s sheer ubiquity lends some credence to the notion that the company is changing the world through ninety-nine-dollar cashmere sweaters. John Jay, Uniqlo’s president of global creative, told me, “Everyone thinks we’re just some company that makes khakis and polo shirts, but we’re a radical brand.”

Uniqlo’s headquarters occupy a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot former warehouse in Ariake, a postindustrial neighborhood on a peninsula of reclaimed land overlooking Tokyo Bay. “I used to go running here,” Conway, from the communications team, said, when I arrived on a breezy morning in April.

The facility is known as Uniqlo City, both because of its size and because of its layout, which mimics an urban grid, with “neighborhoods” and “streets.” Its opening, in 2src17, marked the beginning of a new era in Uniqlo’s self-mythology, known as the Ariake Project. The facility’s designer, Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, told me that the aim of the project was “to rethink the company’s entire work culture” and “literally to try to turn it from a somewhat traditional Japanese company into a global workplace.”

Inside, the building was spare and gleaming: high ceilings, blond wood, large windows. A Noguchi paper lamp with three black dots offered a stray decorative touch. Conway, an amiable Australian, ushered me into a reception area and asked me to sign a form agreeing not to take pictures. It was product-review week, when Uniqlo employees from around the world converge on Uniqlo City to finalize the lineup for the coming season. The deliberate pace of Uniqlo’s design process makes it an outlier. Whereas a business model like Shein’s relies on rushing out the latest microtrends (sardine-print sundresses, fringed boots for Beyoncé concertgoers) in as few as five to seven days, Uniqlo begins planning its range up to a year in advance.

The company has mastered the “hero product,” churning out such hits as the Round Mini Shoulder Bag ($24.9src), a nylon cross-body pack that went viral in April, 2src22, when an Englishwoman named Caitlin Phillimore posted about the shocking number of things that she could fit inside: lip balm, wallet, keys, phone charger, hair clip, headphones, camera, perfume, EpiPen, an entire pack of Fox’s chocolate Viennese biscuits. “It’s giving Mary Poppins!” a commenter enthused. Uniqlo later featured Phillimore in LifeWear, the company’s magazine. “The way I see it, having UNIQLO in your wardrobe takes the headaches out of fashion,” she wrote.

At headquarters, Conway and I took an elevator to the sixth floor. “This is uptown,” he said, leading me along one of the building’s “streets”—a corridor three times the length of a Manhattan block, paved in blue-gray slate. “Now we’re reaching midtown,” he explained. We passed a “space of learning” called the Answer Lab, with videos touting the innovative design of the company’s bras, and an attractive, well-lit room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

“All cities have a library,” Conway said. “This is ours.”

We moved on to the in-house coffee shop, where Robert Johnson’s “King of the Delta Blues Singers”—part of a vinyl collection curated by a Portland record store—was playing on a vintage record player. There was an auditorium known as the Great Hall, inspired by a Kabuki theatre, and a cavernous, empty Portrait Hall panelled in dark wood, where we viewed life-size photographs of Uniqlo ambassadors—all of them male athletes, including Roger Federer, the wheelchair-tennis player Shingo Kunieda, and the golf pro Adam Scott. In August, the company announced that the actor Cate Blanchett was joining the roster. She seems to have already imbibed the company ethos, proclaiming that she is “energised by the opportunity to help UNIQLO advance important aspects of its LifeWear philosophy.”

In a warehouse downstairs, I had read, a fleet of large robots was sorting products. (The company has reportedly eliminated ninety per cent of the warehouse’s human staff.) Somewhere on the premises was also a full-scale mockup store, but Conway informed me that I would be unable to tour it because it was stocked with top-secret prototypes. As the “Severance” vibes intensified, Mr. Yanai-isms rattled through my head: “I believe only companies that contribute to society will last,” “Change or die.” I asked Conway about Uniqlo’s philosophy, and why a clothing company should aspire to improve human existence. Couldn’t it just make nice clothes? “I think, even internally, we’ve asked ourselves, What is it that’s different about us?” Conway replied. “LifeWear is the main difference.”

People who know Uniqlo well are fond of noting the distinctively Japanese aspects of the company. They mention its takumi teams, made up of veteran textile artisans who visit far-flung factories to offer instruction in the fine points of dyeing and sewing. They talk about how its stores benefit from omotenashi, the Japanese culture of perfectly calibrated hospitality, and yonobi, the practice of infusing banal things with beauty. Ken’yaku, a commitment to frugality, is detectable in a corporate culture that frowns on perks or frills. Michael Emmerich, a professor of Japanese literature at U.C.L.A. and a translator of the eleventh-century novel “The Tale of Genji,” co-authored the LifeWear messaging for Uniqlo. He admitted that it was deliberately enigmatic, saying that he wanted customers to “stop a moment and engage with language.” He also recalled spending a day touring stores with Kazumi Yanai, one of Mr. Yanai’s two sons, both of whom are senior executives at Fast Retailing: “At a certain point, he said, ‘Did you know we’re not allowed to use taxis, so I have to pay for this myself?’ ”

Executives are proud of the way that Japanese principles influence the company’s practices, but they don’t consider Uniqlo a Japanese company per se. Yanai has likened Uniqlo to K-pop, an industry that is oriented toward “what will be popular worldwide, rather than focussing on uniquely Korean characteristics.” Uniqlo’s dream of total demographic penetration, the writer W. David Marx has observed, “means minimizing cultural codes” to create “nationless clothes” that are viable in every region.

Conway led me to the company’s R. & D. workshop. A woman sat at a sewing machine, working on a child’s striped onesie, while a colleague, Utsuno Tomoya, stood in front of industrial-sized washers and dryers, running loads of cashmere sweaters to see how they stood up under different cycles. “We’re trying to figure out how to achieve our target hand feeling,” Tomoya explained. “We want them to be soft, but very physically stable.” On a chart, workers had recorded the ideal temperatures and treatments for various colors.

The pride of Ariake is its on-site Customer Center. “It looks like a call center, but we don’t call it a call center,” Conway said, stopping next to a closed door. “We don’t outsource.” Last year, Customer Centers worldwide took in thirty-one million “pieces of information,” fielding telephone inquiries, answering e-mails, monitoring conversations on social media, and gathering in-store feedback. “A lot of it’s gold,” Conway said. Call centers typically enforce strict time limits, but Uniqlo encourages its operators to keep engaging for as long as a customer wants.

It was one such conversation, with a Japanese housewife, that alerted Uniqlo to the fact that customers often wore the brand’s Ultra Light Down Jackets indoors, to save on heating, and that they wanted the sleeves to be snug enough that, when pushed up to the elbows, they wouldn’t slip down while washing dishes. The company applies a sociological attention to the gestures and dilemmas of people’s daily routines; once harvested, these insights are quickly incorporated into product designs. After noticing that more people were commuting by bicycle, designers tweaked the brand’s windproof jacket, shortening its length and tightening the sleeves to prevent air from blowing up a rider’s arms. If Uniqlo’s ideas about virtuous design cycles hold true, these improvements should facilitate even more two-wheeled commutes. Waight Keller told me that Uniqlo’s “favorite term is V.O.C., which means ‘voice of customer.’ ” She admitted that she often lurks online, reading customer comments on the brand’s site.

This practice dates back to the nineteen-nineties, when Uniqlo ran an ad in Japanese newspapers called “One Million Yen for Bad-mouthing Uniqlo,” inviting customers to bitch and gripe. No issue is too minor: faced with complaints that a particular black skinny jean tended to emerge from the dryer covered with lint, Uniqlo developed a lint-repellent coating. When clients said that Uniqlo’s merino wool was too scratchy, the company developed a new “super soft” yarn. A special technology fills the fibres with air, per Uniqlo, in the same way that air is “whipped into egg whites to achieve the light and fluffy texture in a great soufflé.” One can now buy more than twenty items in Soufflé Yarn.

In 1949, when Tadashi Yanai was born in the small coal-mining city of Ube, Japan was still an occupied country. “It was very poor,” Yanai once told the Financial Times. His home town, he has said, reminded him of Cwm Rhondda, the desolate Welsh village in John Ford’s 1941 film “How Green Was My Valley.” Chocolate and coffee were “aspirational” goods. When the local mines closed, many of Yanai’s friends and their families left the city.

At mid-century, Japanese people had been wearing Western-style clothing for only about eighty years. The Tokugawa shogunate, from 16src3 to 1868, long upheld a policy of national seclusion, sealing Japan’s borders and culture from outside influence. When the subsequent Meiji government enacted reforms intended to “modernize” the country, soldiers were issued uniforms inspired by the French Army; the Haircut Edict of 1871 instructed samurai to abandon the traditional chonmage topknot and cut their hair short. Yet the masses continued much as before. According to Yayoi Motohashi, a fashion historian at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, “While there was some increase in the wearing of Western-style clothing after World War I, particularly among upper-class or upper-middle-class women in urban areas, kimono remained the norm for most people well until World War II.”

The Second World War left Japan devastated, but the seven-year occupation that followed inevitably fostered exposure and, for some, a certain attraction to American culture. “In those years of acute hunger and scarcity, the material comfort of the Americans was simply staggering to behold,” the historian John W. Dower writes in “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.” Amid textile shortages, Japanese veterans continued wearing threadbare flight suits, and families found clothes by scouring the black market.

Yanai’s parents owned a run-of-the-mill men’s-clothing store. The family lived above the shop. Eventually, they opened a second, more casual store. It stocked a brand called VAN Jacket, which, alongside such magazines as Otoko no Fukushoku and Heibon Punch, helped to launch a craze for ametora—an abbreviation for “American traditional,” a mode of preppy dressing that became influential in postwar Japan. In “Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style,” W. David Marx writes that such styles “arrived in Japan over the course of several decades, transformed the look of Japanese society, and boomeranged back to influence global style.”

In the United States, the Ivy League look was synonymous with conservatism, but in Japan it represented a rebellion against traditional mores. In advance of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, police swept the streets of Ginza, a fashionable neighborhood in Tokyo, for members of a group of style-conscious students known as the Miyuki Tribe. Their offense was hanging around the neighborhood dressed like Princeton sophomores. The police, Marx writes, “stopped anyone in a button-down shirt and John F. Kennedy haircut,” insuring that foreign visitors returned home without “lurid tales of misbehaving Japanese teenagers in shrunken cotton trousers.” Yanai, undeterred, was the first kid at his high school to wear a white button-down and Converse sneakers.

Yanai enrolled at Waseda University, in Tokyo, majoring in economics and politics, but student protests cancelled classes for more than a year. In 1968, with his education at a standstill, he set off on a trip funded by his parents. “I wanted to travel abroad because I was curious about the way the world outside of Japan worked and what kind of lifestyles people had,” he told the South Korean publication Magazine B. He caught an American President Lines cruise to Hawaii, hopped over to San Francisco, and then rode Greyhound buses across the United States. (He has a model of the cruise ship in his office.)

In 1972, having graduated from college, Yanai started working at the family’s shop. Two years later, he officially took over the business. Every night, he recorded the day’s sales in a handwritten ledger, poring over it until he could recognize trends. After he ordered the clerks at the store to discontinue the unprofitable practice of extending credit on suits, all but one of them quit. In 1984, he opened a larger store, in Hiroshima: Unique Clothing Warehouse. He may have lifted the name, without permission, from New York City’s beloved Unique Clothing Warehouse, which stood on Broadway and Eighth Street from 1973 to 1991 and is remembered for, among other things, employing Jean-Michel Basquiat before he became famous.

Uniclo, as the company was originally known, offered a multitude of brands at bargain prices. “NON SEX NON AGE NON SIZE” read a slogan that Yanai himself painted in colorful letters on the front of the company’s second store. Yanai soon switched to manufacturing his own products. Many of them drew from the ametora tradition—which by then had expanded to include other “American” styles such as outdoor wear—a heritage that continues to inform the company’s offerings. “It’s that reductive, nonchalant, unadorned basic,” Marx told me. “For instance, a Shetland sweater—what Uniqlo does is to take that spirit and then try to create a sweater that is technically the best, most sweaterlike sweater than can be worn by anyone in the world.”

By the nineteen-nineties, Uniclo had expanded to more than a hundred locations, many of them barnlike roadside emporiums where customers could pull in and grab a pack of underwear. (Uniqlo still operates this type of store in Japan and other countries.) In 1988, Yanai established a subsidiary in Hong Kong, where a clerk accidentally transcribed the name as Uniqlo. “Let’s keep it,” Yanai said, figuring that the spelling had a certain dynamism. Japan was in a deep recession, but Uniqlo kept growing, offering bargains for the struggling masses and discretion for better-off consumers in an era that frowned upon conspicuous consumption.

For the company, 1998 was a turning point: the Year of the Fleece. “At that point, fleece was kind of seen as a male, countryside thing,” Motohashi said. “It was not particularly fashionable.” Despite the material’s reputation, it was relatively expensive. Uniqlo saw an opportunity to transform fleece jackets from frumpy technical gear into a stylish, affordable basic by manufacturing at scale. In Japan, people still remember television commercials featuring an overhead conveyor belt bearing vivid jackets in fifty colors: mint, lavender, cornflower blue, clementine orange, lime green. In 2srcsrcsrc, the company sold twenty-six million of these eighteen-dollar fleeces in Japan, enough to clothe more than twenty per cent of the country’s population.

Uniqlo opened its first U.S. store in 2srcsrc5, at a regional mall in Edison, New Jersey. A thirty-six-thousand-square-foot flagship store, in SoHo—the largest single-brand fashion outpost in the neighborhood—followed the next year. The idea was to flood the zone of American retail, alerting the Cheesecake Factory diner and the Dean & DeLuca shopper alike to the arrival of a new, ambitious clothier. “If I opened a very small store, no one would ever pay attention,” Yanai told the Times. “We have to open in a big way, to make people recognize who we are.”

New York shoppers embraced Uniqlo. One finance guy bought T-shirts, socks, and underwear so regularly that staff wondered whether he had just stopped doing laundry. Skinny jeans were taking off, and a hipster clientele appreciated the unusually narrow cut of the brand’s denim. Fixated on cracking the American market, Yanai tried unsuccessfully to buy the high-end retailer Barneys; two years later, rumors abounded that he was trying to acquire Gap. (No such deal ever materialized, but Fast Retailing did end up buying American companies such as Theory and J Brand.) In 2srcsrc9, Uniqlo pulled off a “fashion miracle,” as The Cut later wrote, persuading the reclusive German designer Jil Sander to create a collection, called +J. By 2src1src, Uniqlo was so popular in the city that New York proclaimed it the “hottest retailer,” labelling its customers “Uniqlones.”

Elsewhere in America, the company’s strategy wasn’t working. Mall shoppers favored familiar names over an unknown Japanese brand that shunned logos, ignored trends, and rarely marked down prices. Customers also struggled with unforgiving cuts unsuited to larger American bodies. Yanai’s autobiography is called “One Win Nine Losses,” a reference to his penchant for learning from mistakes. But the botched American rollout represented a different order of defeat. “The U.S. was my biggest failure,” he told Time.

With losses mounting, Uniqlo closed some of its U.S. stores. In the early twenty-tens, it shifted its focus in the U.S. to building flagship stores in high-traffic urban locations. Recently, the company announced an aggressive plan to expand from a hundred and six North American stores to two hundred by 2src27, venturing into new regions. Last year, it opened its first stores in Texas, where online sales had been particularly strong.

Uniqlo has adjusted its sizing for the U.S. market—an American small is closest to a Japanese medium—but frustrations still arise. When Essence recently posted a cover featuring Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler in crisp white AIRism Oversized T-shirts, several commenters rued the fact that Uniqlo stores don’t stock sizes bigger than XL. (XXL and XXXL are available only online.) And the company remains under the radar in many parts of the country. “I think they’re really going to have to do some marketing,” Cathaleen Chen, who covers retail for The Business of Fashion, told me. “Most people don’t know what a Uniqlo television ad looks like.” Even so, the company finally seems to be making serious inroads: last year, revenues in the North American market increased by more than thirty per cent.

The store is the palace of the Uniqlo kingdom. “We call our head offices ‘store-support centers,’ ” Conway told me, as we toured a newly renovated Uniqlo in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. Japan has sixteen official holidays a year, but Uniqlo executives don’t take those days off, in solidarity with the store staff who have to work. Even some senior executives have started their careers on the shop floor, learning how to restock shelves and fold jeans in a very specific way (inseam tucked, legs doubled over so that the label is visible). According to Uniqlo’s zen’in keiei philosophy, “Everybody is a manager.”

A large red paper lantern bearing Uniqlo’s logo hung from the ceiling, resembling one that hangs at the Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate, which serves as the entrance to Sensoji, the famous nearby temple. At a customization and repair counter, people flipped through binders of motifs—penguins, sushi, cherry blossoms, a special Asakusa logo recalling a votive slip—that they could have embroidered on a bag or a cardigan. “We don’t want to be a chain store,” Conway said of the local touches. Other shoppers perused a display of traditional sake casks or purchased T-shirts celebrating neighborhood artisans—paper-makers; a bakery specializing in melonpan, a crispy sweet bun—as drum-and-flute music from Asakusa’s annual festival played over the sound system.

The shirts, available only at the Asakusa store, were part of a program that Uniqlo calls UT, which issues graphic T-shirts enabled by a dizzying array of licensing deals: Studio Ghibli, Picasso, Disney, Peanuts, Sylvanian Families, Coca-Cola, Hello Kitty, Andy Warhol, manga heroes, adorable kittens poking their heads through pieces of toast. I had always had trouble getting my head around UT because I could never figure out what Warhol had to do with Uniqlo (and also because, outside the Uniqlo universe, the letters “UT” are most often followed by an “I”). But the line is wildly popular—the launch of a collaboration with the street artist KAWS sparked a frenzy in China in 2src19, with shoppers crawling under shutters, removing clothes from mannequins, and putting one another in headlocks to get the shirts before they were gone.

Under normal circumstances, the Uniqlo shopper should walk into a store and feel a sense of overwhelming abundance. Such is the logic behind Uniqlo’s power walls of thousands of sweaters on shelves that reach so high you fear that they might bust right through the ceiling, like Willy Wonka’s elevator. The display is arranged according to a precise formula, with sizes increasing from floor to ceiling, and colors darkening from left to right, as well as from the entrance to the back of the store.

Each pile is assessed for tidiness multiple times a day, using a five-rank grading system. A “B” grade might mean that a green blouse has found its way into a blue stack, while “D” is reserved for serious cases like a completely empty stack, or items that have fallen on the ground. Like IKEA, which intentionally musses and jumbles its displays, Uniqlo believes that volume is the catalyst of consumer desire. Conway explained, “We want everything to appear fully stocked all the time.”

Customer service at Uniqlo is unobtrusive, whether because of omotenashi principles or because of a desire to save on labor. At the Paris flagship store, near where I live, there is pedagogical signage everywhere, but it is consistently difficult to find a person to answer a question. “We try not to harass the customer,” Conway told me. “We try to give them space to look and touch and feel the clothes and, you know, enjoy the store without being bothered.” Apparently, one of Yanai’s inspirations for this hands-off style of service was a visit that he made to a university co-op during a trip to the U.S.; Uniqlo now trains employees to sell clothes like they are selling books, letting customers browse freely.

In the Asakusa store, a customer walked past.

“Do you need a basket?” a sales associate inquired.

Conway told me that this strategy gives customers “a chance to say, ‘I don’t need a basket, but I need help with a sweater.’ It’s an indirect way to initiate communication—low pressure, because you’re offered something specific versus asking, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

At one point, Uniqlo was said to have a rule that obliged cashiers to complete every transaction in a minute or less. Now many Uniqlo stores use R.F.I.D. technology for checkout, allowing customers to simply chuck their items into a bin and pay within seconds, no scanning required. It’s such a frictionless experience that it can feel, for better or for worse, as if you didn’t pay at all. The tags also transmit data back to Uniqlo, which, per the Wall Street Journal, uses the information in “improving the accuracy of inventory in stores, adjusting production based on demand, and getting more visibility into its supply chain.”

Since the pandemic, Uniqlo has doubled down on physical stores. Last year, e-commerce accounted for only fifteen per cent of sales. The company has made some effort to improve its multi-channel outreach, via Instagram and TikTok, but, as Sarah Shapiro wrote recently in Puck, “the company’s neglect of their digital storefront” remains “an unacceptable pain point for a company with more than $2src billion in annual revenue.”

Customers complain that Uniqlo’s website is difficult to navigate, that it’s cluttered, that it requires too much scrolling. Coveted collaborations are hard to locate. These issues can be particularly off-putting to American customers, who have come to expect a seamless online experience tailored to their cultural preferences. “I felt like I was signing up for a dating app,” an acquaintance recounted to me, saying that she’d had to create an account just to buy some socks.

Shapiro told me about an industry term called “rage clicks,” referring to instances when a customer “has to click the same button multiple times and gets really annoyed.” She continued, “On a regular site, you say, ‘O.K., what were our rage clicks this week?’ That is something I assume Uniqlo’s not doing, because for me the whole site is a rage click.” Still, she wrote, “when Uniqlo finally modernizes online shopping to match their products, I think they’ll capture the American consumer they’ve been chasing all along.”

Clare Waight Keller travels to Tokyo eight times a year, but the rest of the time she works from London, where she lives. In May, I visited her at Uniqlo’s offices there, in an unremarkable building off Regent Street. When I arrived, she was sitting on a rolling chair in a conference room. Vintage fabric samples—tweeds, linens, a sky-blue poplin with white contrail stripes—hung from a rack against a wall. She had her iPad out and was drinking iced coffee from a plastic cup.

“I’m working on some color adds,” she explained. In the past, she told me, a lot of Uniqlo’s colors “were either a little too vivid and maybe a bit too hot or too sad.” The company had traditionally hesitated to include browns in its product range, but in her first year, after nixing the violet, Waight Keller introduced mocha brown, chocolaty brown, and a winey brown that looked like it had been poured from a decanter. “Translating those really rich, beautiful colors into something like a sweatsuit—nobody had seen it, especially in the Asian market,” she said.

Waight Keller was dressed in full Uniqlo : C, an “elevated LifeWear essentials” line that she designs alongside the main collection. She wore a navy-blue hooded pin-striped parka in lightweight cotton, paired with a belted pencil skirt, in the same pattern, that hit at mid-calf. I had wanted to buy the same outfit, but it had sold out before I’d managed to. “Did you know you had a hit?” I asked Waight Keller. She replied, “Yeah, honestly, it’s this kind of thing where I design it and then I’m, like, ‘That’s on my order list.’ ”

Uniqlo brought on Waight Keller, who famously designed Meghan Markle’s wedding dress, in part to improve its offerings for women. “She was just such a clever choice,” Paton told me. “She’s an insider, and the idea that someone who could design a royal wedding gown and helm iconic fashion houses is now designing your wardrobe basics? They’re managing to position themselves in the minds of their consumers as somehow elevated from their European rivals.” The pitch, Waight Keller said, was “We want that element of fashion to come in.” Challenges abounded. “The skirts business was a disaster,” she recalled. “And the same with dresses. I think they’d always approached dresses as, like, T-shirts. And I just said, ‘You know, we need to do things with the waist.’ ”

These weak spots were, she said, partially a product of the company’s history. “Mr. Yanai came up in menswear, and he has that sort of disciplined item-by-item approach,” Waight Keller said. “Women’s is completely different, and it has a much more emotional element to it. Men go in and say, ‘I need a shirt this season.’ Women go in and say, ‘I need an outfit.’ ”

At the same time that Waight Keller has been working to change some aspects of Uniqlo, Uniqlo has changed her way of working. “In luxury, we often look at putting on a lot of details to make something special,” she said. “Uniqlo is all about softness, it’s all about comfort and distilling the design down to the simplest, perfected form.” At Uniqlo, there will be no high-flown show notes, no hemline diktats, no Loulou de la Falaise mood boards followed by, the next season, a turn toward grunge.

The company is nonetheless fastidious about the fundamental details. For example, Waight Keller explained, Uniqlo finishes every zipper track with a small piece of fabric known as a “garage.” It keeps gunk out of the device and protects against abrasion. Other fixes are invisible. “You know our signature Ultra Light Down?” Yuki Katsuta, Uniqlo’s global head of research and design, asked me. “Every season, we spend months talking about how we can make it ten or twenty grams lighter.”

Last year, Waight Keller noticed that Uniqlo didn’t offer any V-neck sweaters, so she included one in the Uniqlo : C collection. “I saw Mr. Yanai, and he was, like, ‘Why did that sell?’ ” Waight Keller recalled. “I said that the V had the perfect pitch of proportion. I would describe it as a V-neck for a crewneck person.” They decided to introduce V-necks into the main range, but not before performing a study in which they enlisted models to try every type of collar that the company offers—button-down, straight, polo, camp, etc.—underneath the new product. Recently, designers also made millimetric adjustments to the best-selling AIRism T-shirt, tweaking the shirt’s inner seams to insure that the neckline would lie flatter, with no bumps. “These are the sort of subtleties that an average customer would never detect,” Waight Keller said. “But the concept is that you walk into the shop, you take the T-shirt, you pull it over your head, and it just sits perfectly.”

Uniqlo sells the same products around the globe, but certain local considerations influence the design. “Plaid, for example, is difficult,” Waight Keller said. “Japan prefers small checks, while the rest of the world prefers big checks.” Sunglasses need to be somewhat transparent in Japan, she told me, since dark lenses are viewed with suspicion. Japanese women are unlikely to buy a shirt that shows a lot of cleavage. “There’s a specific neck drop that you don’t go below,” Waight Keller said. “It’s maybe twenty-three centimetres, so mid-chest.” Recently, she designed a polyamide bag, envisioning it as a laptop tote. It sold out within ten minutes in South Korea, where word had spread that it was the perfect size for a motorbike helmet.

When Waight Keller isn’t working, she travels: to Amsterdam, Shanghai, Kyoto, Nara. A colleague had told me that she was constantly snapping images of interestingly dressed people on the street. I asked if I could see someone who had caught her eye. She pulled out her phone and scrolled to a shot, taken in Seoul, of a young woman wearing heather-gray sweatpants embellished with cursive lettering (“LOVE NEVER FELT SO GOOD”) down the left leg. She wore the pants with bulbous black clogs, two hoodies—black and gray, hoods up—and a fluffy bomber jacket. After taking the picture, Waight Keller immediately forwarded it to her team as a reference. “It’s all about proportion,” she explained.

A typical order at a Uniqlo factory is a million units. For this and other reasons, Uniqlo claims that its factories aren’t like other factories. “We don’t really do short runs and see you later,” Conway told me on a visit to the Fast Retailing Innovation Factory, a state-of-the-art facility that Uniqlo has operated in Tokyo since 2src21 as a joint venture with the knitting-machine manufacturer Shima Seiki. When we arrived, we were greeted by Utsuno Tomoya, the R. & D. manager, who asked us to take off our shoes and put on backless slippers.

Tomoya led us onto a factory floor, where employees were working at machines that produce a variety of seamless knits. The machines whizzed and whirred. They were running twenty-four hours a day, but the Innovation Factory’s output is feeble compared with that of Uniqlo’s subcontractors in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, China, and Indonesia. “We make twenty-four hundred garments a day,” Tomoya explained. “They can make nineteen thousand.”

The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said. We walked past an electronics locker, to which employees surrender their phones before their eight-hour shifts.

After knitting and inspection, the items went upstairs for washing. They came out thicker and fluffier than before. Each item was then tagged, ironed, and inspected again. In a corner of the warehouse, a woman was examining a Soufflé skirt. She pulled it apart, as though kneading dough, and let it bounce back to its usual shape. Then she did the same with the hem, revealing that the machine had missed a stitch. The woman marked the offending area with red thread and put it aside, to be sent to the factory’s repair sector. The skirts that passed muster would be put through a metal detector—to insure that there were no stray needles—then folded, packed, and shipped out to the port on trucks. The music chimed again: break time.

So is Uniqlo fast fashion or not? The company’s foundational secret, executives say, lies in its tightly focussed product line, which enables it to buy and develop fabric in enormous quantities. This puts the company in a uniquely advantageous negotiating position, allowing it to offer better quality at lower prices. “We are misunderstood as a fast fashion brand, we are the opposite,” Kazumi Yanai recently declared.

It is true that Uniqlo has made concrete efforts to be more sustainable. It has, for example, pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in stores and offices by ninety per cent before 2src3src, and it is already halfway to that target. Eighteen per cent of the company’s clothing is made from recycled or other climate-friendly materials. Inspired by the leaves of the lotus plant, Uniqlo came up with a natural way to repel water from rain gear, an innovation more in demand than ever as customers push to phase out PFAS. Uniqlo says that it doesn’t burn or dump unsold inventory, and that it has directed approximately sixty million pieces of clothing toward emergency aid, in addition to donating thirty-eight million dollars to support programs run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

But much of what Fast Retailing says about its deep commitment to creating timeless clothes is undercut by the fact that it also owns GU, a lower-priced sister brand. Pronounced “jee-you,” GU offers “trend-driven styles” and “rapid turnaround times from design to retail”—with, presumably, rapid turnaround times from retail to landfill as well. And the scale of Uniqlo’s operations, not to mention its quest for endless expansion, makes real sustainability an impossibility. Maxine Bédat, the director of a sustainability think tank called the New Standard Institute, told me, “While Uniqlo has made some strides, it’s part of an industry-wide problem that piecemeal initiatives can’t resolve.”

According to the latest available data, from a 2src16 McKinsey report, the average consumer buys sixty per cent more clothes than she did about fifteen years ago, and keeps them for half as long. Thirty per cent of the clothes manufactured in a given year are never sold, much less worn. The question of whether or not Uniqlo is fast fashion or sustainable fashion or ethical fashion has perhaps become irrelevant in a world in which fashion—no modifier needed—is increasingly culpable for the ravaging of the planet.

The likelihood of Uniqlo fulfilling its global ambitions depends in large part on whether it is, at long last, able to conquer the American market. Will U.S. customers submit to the notion that dressing like everyone else has its benefits? In fashion, as in politics, collectivism might make life better, but individualism often prevails.

The company also has a cultural goal: “to democratize art for all.” For more than a decade, Uniqlo has sponsored free public programs at MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Louvre, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In exchange, the company burnishes its halo of high-mindedness, receives the right to feature famous works on its T-shirts, and gets to stage events in empty galleries or under an iconic glass pyramid, furthering the idea that its interests lie in Life as much as in Wear.

On one such night in May, Uniqlo gathered a crowd at the Tate Modern, in London, to bestow awards for the UT Grand Prix, an annual competition in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. About a hundred people packed into the museum’s private cinema to hear the results—five winners out of some ten thousand entries—while munching popcorn from little striped cartons.

I was impressed by Ahn Do Eun, a seventeen-year-old student from South Korea, who was the youngest winner, for an abstract submission—yellow splotches, pink streaks, smeary pepperoni reds—that she called “The Pizza I Want to Eat.” Unlike her adult competitors, she was wearing a suit, with her hair sharply parted in the middle. She got up on the stage and read shyly from her phone: “One day, I got told off by my dad. I was feeling so sad and angry, but, even in that moment, I wanted a pizza. The toppings are my emotions.”

Afterward, there was prosecco and a d.j. in the museum’s atrium, the center of which was given over to Louise Bourgeois’s soaring steel spider, “Maman.” Lingering by one of its attenuated, knobby legs, I struck up a conversation with a quiet, conservatively dressed man. He was wearing a Uniqlo lapel pin, in the manner of an American politician’s flag. It was Koji Yanai, one of Yanai’s sons.

I told him that I was writing a story about Uniqlo and asked if there was anything about the company that he thought was misunderstood. “In the past, we haven’t always been good at telling our story,” he said. “But most apparel brands are not existing like us.” I had heard Uniqlo executives compare the company to Apple, releasing gradual updates each season, “like iPhone 4, iPhone 5,” or to a supermarket of clothing, serving daily needs. Koji preferred another, even further-reaching metaphor. “We want to be the infrastructure of clothing,” he said. “Water, gas, electricity, and Uniqlo.”

Mr. Yanai long vowed that he would step down as C.E.O. when he turned seventy, but, in 2src19, his birthday came and went uneventfully. In 2src23, he theoretically ceded control of day-to-day operations to a longtime deputy, but, by all accounts, he is still vigorously involved in decision-making at every level. Inside Uniqlo, he commands an admiring cult of personality. He famously starts his workday at seven, leaving by four to spend time with his wife.

I met Yanai in Paris, during Fashion Week, in the fall of 2src24. Uniqlo had rented an exhibition space just off the prestigious Place Vendôme, and was staging a fortieth-anniversary retrospective called “The Art and Science of LifeWear.” In one area of the exhibit, you could “touch the tech”—it’s surprisingly fun to plunge your hand into a vat of imitation down. The company’s events tend to skew earnest for fashion, and this one was no exception, beginning with an address by Yanai—translated live from Japanese, via headsets—featuring various charts and graphs. “We are living in the greatest time of change in history at a speed unlike any time of previous revolution,” he declared. This was followed by a forty-five-minute conversation between Waight Keller and Roger Federer dedicated to the question “What Makes Life Better?” (Waight Keller: “Inspiration.” Federer: “Kindness.”) There were mentions of “electrolyte membranes” and “carbon-fibre solutions.”

After the presentation, I was spirited away for a brief audience with Yanai at Uniqlo’s nearby offices. Diplomatic levels of protocol were in effect, implemented by a team of handlers. In a bright room, Yanai was seated on a low couch flanked by a formally dressed interpreter. Yanai had a crewcut and wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, with a pocket square and a polka-dot tie. “You don’t really see anyone dressed in a suit these days,” he said, laughing. “This is very outdated. But, as the host, we wanted to be polite.”

Outside the company, Yanai comes across as a game and almost impish corporate prophet. I asked if he could give me a concrete example of Uniqlo clothing making life better. He responded by pulling a laminated card from his jacket pocket:

Uniqlo is the elements of style.

Uniqlo is a toolbox for living.

Uniqlo is clothes that suit your values.

Uniqlo is how the future dresses.

Uniqlo is beauty in hyperpracticality.

Uniqlo is clothing in the absolute.

Half jokingly, I asked if I could keep the card. I was surprised when he agreed. I walked away thinking I’d extracted some truth so dear to Yanai that he literally keeps it close to his breast.

Later, I came across a 2src12 article in Forbes in which the writer describes receiving a laminated card from Yanai in just the same fashion. Yanai, it turned out, was practicing not diplomacy but something more like royal manners, meeting all comers with smooth little business cards in the same way that Queen Elizabeth II was said to respond to every conversational sally with “Quite.” In a sense, it was the perfect Uniqlo gesture—elegant, inexpensive, made for no one and everyone at the same time. ♦