Our story

Takuya Ichinose (Tek)  was born in Yokohama, Japan. He graduated from Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, and moved to the US in 2010. 

Tek studied under Lun*na Menoh, who’s an apparel-based artist in Los Angeles, and stayed active in Silver Lake’s art community. Tek has worked on various projects, such as leather works, stamp paintings and performance fashion shows, and as he has progressed as an artist, he’s realized that his aesthetics are created coincidentally, arising from unartificial, uncalculated and unconscious interests of his, known in Japan as  ‘Wabi-Sabi’ (loosely translated as "beauty"), an essential component of his creative process.

In 2015, Tek established his lifestyle fashion brand, Artisan-Collage, Tek's vision for the brand was to exploit the uniqueness of materials with his design and artistic ability, even if the material is hard to handle. While being active with showings at craft shows and popup events around Los Angeles, Tek started to feel tired of urban development in craft making, in which people only seek rationality and change the process in a more industrial way. 

In 2018, Tek moved to Joshua Tree, California,  located in the Mojave Desert to be close to nature. He started living near a national park, far away from big cities. Tek has been inspired by the color palettes of nature and the night sky of the desert.  In his pieces, he uses sustainable materials such as linen, hemp, organic cotton and overstock fabric.  He employs non-industrial and traditional Japanese techniques, and finds beauty in the imperfections of his work, such as indigo and mud dye, and Sashiko stitching.