When Fashion Meets Furniture: Vowels and Waka Waka Debut Collaboration

Last weekend in New York, Vowels unveiled its Fall/Winter 2025 collection through an immersive collaboration with the California–based furniture studio Waka Waka. What began as conversations between Vowels’ creative director Yuki Yagi and Waka Waka’s founder Shin Okuda, stretching from Tokyo to Los Angeles, has materialized in a series of custom furniture pieces that blur the line between fashion and furniture design.

The journey underscored the way fashion and furniture “share the same language, shaping how we live, move, and feel,” said Yagi. Okuda echoed the sentiment, pointing to the productive tension in design: “It’s always about how a piece can reflect a place, a person, a time—satisfying a functional demand but also carrying authenticity in its language.”

Shared Philosophies, Different Disciplines

The collaboration found common ground in Vowels’ guiding principle of “Shu Ha Ri”—a Japanese philosophy of learning the rules before breaking them. “With Waka Waka, that meant grounding in classic forms before pushing them into something playful, functional, and distinctly ours,” said Yagi. For Okuda, that same respect for tradition and quality has always defined his studio, “You grow with the piece—you don’t grow away from it,” he added.

The result was a chair and stool that connected both practices through subtle gestures and intentional choices. Dowels and cylinders, signature in Okuda’s vocabulary, became the foundation, while Yuki introduced the bold intervention of International Klein Blue, a color long associated with experimentation and persistence. “I asked Shin to use Yves Klein Blue as a representation of trial and error,” Yagi said. “A reminder of the countless rounds Klein went through to perfect his hue.” For Okuda, the shade gave the pared-back forms “a new vibration, almost like a pulse running through the silhouettes.”

Rituals, Materials, and Memory

Crafted from Baltic birch plywood and maple dowels, the furniture embodies material honesty and restraint. “Baltic birch is like a blank sheet of paper,” Okuda shared. “Its limits are clear, but the possibilities within those limits are endless.” That philosophy of clarity runs parallel to Vowels’ approach to clothing, where construction and material set the stage for expression.

Both designers spoke about how furniture, like fashion, shapes the rhythms of daily life. Yagi pointed to the cultural evolution of something as simple as a pillow, from high wooden versions in Japan that preserved hairstyles, to nomadic headrests in Somalia, to heirloom embroideries in Europe. “Furniture, like fashion, quietly guides how we live every day,” Yagi said. “Daily rituals create attachment—what chair we eat in, what stool we rest on, the objects we return to shape our memories,” Okuda added.

Bridging Worlds with Vowels x Waka Waka

The collaboration’s unveiling has spanned cities, New York and Tokyo, while connecting Los Angeles and Japanese sensibilities. For Yagi and Okuda, that global exchange is less about geography and more about energy. “If the work makes people smile, then we’ve done our job,” Yagi shared. “This autumn/winter, we’re bringing both furniture and apparel to cities worldwide—creating spaces that feel grounded, inviting, and uniquely ours.”

In many ways, the Vowels x Waka Waka collaboration is less about crossing disciplines and more about erasing them. Clothing becomes space, furniture becomes memory, and together they shape how we move through the world. “I want people to engage with the pieces—try them on, sit down, live with them for a moment,” said Okuda. “I like to surprise people, and I hope these works open up new possibilities for how someone thinks about their own space.”

With bold silhouettes, pared-back details, and the unmistakable resonance of Yves Klein Blue, the project invites audiences to rethink not just how they dress, but how they dwell.