Flipping Through Kapital Lookbooks at Cotton Sheep - San Francisco

Life sometimes has a funny way of surprising you when you least expect it.

Every year, my wife and I try and take a trip out to the Bay Area, and in recent years that's meant trying to finagle a way to get myself to Unionmade's brick and mortar location in the Mission District. On our most recent visit, I found myself trudging through Hayes Valley trying to come up with an excuse for how I could scam my wife to get over there (Bi-Rite Creamery and Dolores Park have been bankable in the past) when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a window display with a mannequin clad in an artfully rumpled tweed jacket, faded patchwork bandana scarf, and indigo cotton sashiko pants. I had just discovered Cotton Sheep - the coolest little store I was never looking for.

Cotton Sheep is a small family-owned boutique specializing in Japanese labels like Kapital, Visvim, and a few others I'd never even heard of. Inside the store, you'll find an assortment of some the more lusted-after Kapital pieces in the catalogue, including a wealth of Century Denim and a few different flavors of ring coats adorning the wall. They carry a lot of items you'd probably be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in America, and yet that's only a small part of what makes Cotton Sheep special.

 

Aria, the owners' daughter who happened to be running the shop that day, informed me that they were actually the first store outside of Japan to carry Kapital, and every year her older brother Rue travels back to the showroom in Japan to check out the new season's collection. Family friends of much of the Kapital crew, they've both been asked to model for lookbooks in the past, though they've always declined to this point. When Kapital finished their documentary "Kapital World" (which you can watch for free online) for the shooting of their 2014 spring collection "Sailor Ninja" - the most Japanese and Kapital-esque title imaginable - one of the few screening locations around the world was at Cotton Sheep, where they had a big viewing party and her mom ran around the shop a little tipsy. It happened - I saw the pictures. They were adorable.

Cotton Sheep "Kapital World" Screening

After showing me the scrapbook from the "Kapital World" screening, Aria brought out a stack of old lookbooks they had behind the counter from past seasons for me to flip through while we chatted about various topics like Japanese style, the Kansei region her mother's side is from (which she affectionately described as "The 'Jersey Shore' of Japan"), and the little Japanese guy with the moustache you might have noticed in so many Kapital pictures whose name we couldn't remember (it's "Kohei Manabe," she later recalled). I'm not sure exactly how long I was there, honestly, but it's hard to recall a happenstance encounter in recent memory I've enjoyed as thoroughly. As I mentioned, life has a funny way of surprising you when you least expect it, and little impromptu moments of magic are all too rare.

 
It's easy these days to think of businesses as faceless corporate entities, and in doing so we often forget about the people behind them. I'll be the first to admit that the manner in which I usually shop tends to only enforce that view, and yet in the short time I spent at Cotton Sheep, I came away with a feeling completely opposite. Though they offer a quality range of products in and of themselves, I can't think of a better example of a family business that foremost feels like a family. I suppose I have Aria to thank for that, in large part, though thumbing through Cotton Sheep's Instagram feed, which frequently features family and staff modelling clothes or Rue's travels in Japan, only adds to that sentiment.

You can find Cotton Sheep on their retail site or follow their Instagram account here. Otherwise, I'd highly recommend dropping by if you're in the Hayes Valley area. It's true I couldn't possibly guarantee the same type of experience, but at the bare minimum, there are ring coats. Shouldn't that be enough?