Why I can’t make WHAT I used to

Dear friends,

Over the years, many of you have written to ask—sometimes passionately—why I no longer make the menswear you remember: the jacquard cotton shirts, knits, sueded pieces, and all the deeply crafted garments that defined my earlier work. I understand the question, and I feel it too. Those pieces mattered to me as much as they did to you.

So I wanted to explain, fully and honestly, why I can’t do what I once did.

When my financial partner pulled out and I closed my clothing business, much of the specialized equipment I relied on in Japan was dismantled or repurposed soon after. Many of the mills had built custom loom setups, weave structures, and production workflows specifically for my work. Once the line ended, those capabilities disappeared. Even if I wanted to remake those garments today, many of the techniques quite literally no longer exist.

I’ve also changed structurally. I no longer have a fashion company or a staff. Today it’s just me and Adrian. Running a full apparel operation—fabric development, sampling, grading, sizing, inventory, shipping, returns, seasons—simply isn’t possible for us.

That said, I want you to know this: I do still dream up new ventures—constantly. Sometimes nightly. Most recently, I found myself imagining throws made with one of my Japanese weavers: buying the fabric, cutting and finishing them myself, something intimate and manageable. But reality always intervenes.

For example, I could realistically place orders only every two or three years—similar to how I handle my socks—because it takes that long to sell through inventory. And business has to work for both sides. My suppliers need consistent volume to survive. In the case of my sock manufacturer, he decided—after stopping twice—that his employees genuinely loved making my socks, and so he was willing to continue. Even then, I buy the yarn myself and warehouse all the inventory. The only reason that model works at all is because socks have no sizes, no seasons, and no fit issues.

That’s why throws briefly seemed promising. But even there, success would require marketing—significantly expanding my reach to move product faster. And here’s the honest truth: marketing is the part of the business I always disliked the most. That tension—between creative joy and promotional effort—makes many of these ideas not worth pursuing for me at this stage of my life.

This brings me to Printify.

The Printify model works logistically. I can place my designs on their blanks, and they handle production, inventory, fulfillment, and shipping. That’s why I can still put new work into the world without rebuilding a company from scratch.

But there are real limitations. I have no control over fit, construction, or most aspects of quality. I’ve spent a great deal of money sampling dozens and dozens of products to see which ones are acceptable by my standards. A few are. Most are not. And now, with tariffs increasing costs and many higher-quality blanks being discontinued, even that small pool is shrinking.

And yes—I hate making polyester garments. I always have. Unfortunately, digital printing still works best on synthetic fibers, which is why cotton is largely unavailable in this model. Even when the business structure fits my limited resources, the materials often don’t fit my aesthetic.

So when you see something new from me today, please understand: it represents a careful negotiation between what I can do, what I enjoy doing, what I can manage without staff, and what allows me to stay creatively active without rebuilding the machinery—literal and figurative—of a fashion house.

I remain deeply grateful that so many of you still care enough to ask, to remember, and to collect the work I made decades ago. That work mattered. It still does. And knowing it continues to be worn, cherished, and even hunted for is incredibly meaningful to me.

Warmly,

Jhane

P.S.

For those of you searching for earlier pieces, many of my original menswear designs—shirts, knits, jackets—surface from time to time on eBay, often from longtime collectors.