“In hip-hop culture, sampling is basically taking a part of music and leveraging that for your own,” Genki Matsumoto, a 31-year-old beatboxer, said. He performs under the stage name Gen, and he invoked the concept of sampling music while explaining that he had used textiles from a half-dozen military duffel bags to make some of the clothing that he was wearing.
“I wanted to take this interesting material and fabric and then translate it into something of my own,” he said, noting that he began designing items of clothing about four years ago, around the time that he and his musical group, Resonance, won first place in a Japanese beatboxing competition.
He and I met on a Friday in March, outside the Shibuya railway station in Tokyo, after he had attended a runway show held as part of Tokyo Fashion Week. The idea of participating in an event like fashion week was alluring to him, he said, adding that his current approach of making one-off garments had its own draw. “Both are appealing pathways,” as he put it.
Simbarashe Cha is a Times photographer and visual columnist documenting style and fashion around the world.
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