Close to midnight at a level crossing in Otemachi. A train smears past in red and gold, and a man waits at the barrier in a mineral-blue fleece. The small zipped pocket on the chest reads Aman, Kim Jones.
Jones has designed a full line for Aman Essentials, the lifestyle arm of the hotel group. It launched this week in Tokyo, with a campaign photographed at Aman Tokyo and across the city by Philipp Paulus. Sleepwear, swimwear, activewear, tailoring and accessories, built for the hours a guest spends inside an Aman and the hours just outside it.
The fit is personal. Jones is one of Aman's most loyal guests. He reckons he has stayed at around thirty of the group's thirty-six properties and counts among its two biggest spenders worldwide. He has a ritual on arrival. He walks to the hotel shop and buys most of what is on the shelf.
The shop
Kristina Romanova runs Aman Essentials and set the brief. She wanted clothes that are versatile and functional and carry a quiet elegance, pieces that move from a treatment room to a city street without changing register. She and Jones had circled the idea for years. They met at a masked ball in Venice, and the line took roughly eighteen months to build.
The clothes read as resort wear with the volume turned down. Silk pyjama sets come in a mineral-blue stripe and a deep kombu green. There is a draped silk dress in the same green at £2,566. Zip-up Harrington jackets and a windcheater in mineral blue. City shorts tailored from abaca, the banana-leaf fibre. Base-layer tanks and leggings, a striped knit polo, a black jersey hoodie.
The accessories hold the character. Padded nylon slippers lined in fleece, closed with a toggle, sell for £540. Swimwear is edged in woven cord, the bikinis and board shorts and swimming costumes finished with visible zips. The palette borrows from the sea and the forest and little else.
Kombu and cord
Prices sit where hotel merchandise rarely goes. A silk pyjama shirt runs £1,130, the windcheater £960, the knit polo £800. The line sells at selected Aman resorts, on the group's own shop, and at a handful of Dover Street Market stores, Ginza among them.
Jones brings a long track record to it. He built the modern travel wardrobe at Louis Vuitton, ran menswear at Fendi and Dior, and has just launched an eponymous label with a first collection due next year. The Aman work sits to one side of all that. There is no runway and no season, only a wardrobe for the space between a flight and a bath.
The best hotel leaves you nothing to decide. Jones has made clothes that ask the same of you.
Camille AshworthOtemachi
Aman Tokyo occupies the top six floors of the Otemachi Tower, a rare city address for a group built on remote retreats. Adrian Zecha founded Aman in 1988 and took the name from the Sanskrit word for peace. The first property, Amanpuri, opened in Phuket. Paulus reads the brand against the city instead of the jungle, a taxi with lace headrests, an office lift packed with suits, a train at a crossing.
Aman x Kim Jones, Tokyo. Courtesy of Aman
The Tokyo launch ran to an eight-course dinner in the hotel, with Verbal and Yoon among the guests. The collection it toasted is a strange, precise object. It is hotel merchandise made by one of the most travelled designers in fashion, aimed at the people who already live this way. The hotel shop, restocked by the man who used to empty it.