The UT brand and UT STORE HARAJUKU. were both established in 2007. After several location changes, UT STORE returns to Harajuku in 2020.
A brief history of UT STORE.
In April 2007, the UNIQLO Harajuku Store was renamed UT STORE HARAJUKU. It maintained the red and white corporate colors, while adding a silver accent to give it the feel of a futuristic convenience store. All three floors stocked nothing but T-shirts, packaged in plastic bottles lining silver shelves like soft drink racks. Shirts on hangers were displayed in the center of each floor, labeled with tags indicating to which bottle on which shelf it corresponded—but customers could also use one of many instore touchscreens to find what they were looking for. Pull a bottle from the shelf, and the bottles behind it slid forward to take its place—just like in a convenience store. The point was clear: buying T shirts should be as casual as buying a soft drink.
2007 UT STORE HARAJUKU.
The store was the brainchild of art director Kashiwa Sato, who also designed the UNIQLO flagship store in New York’s Soho district that opened six months earlier in fall 2006. The Japanese Pop Culture Project, an initiative he organized to mark the store’s opening, was so successful that it led directly to the creation of UT.
T-shirts are packaged in the plastic bottles, each featuring a different label design. Over 500 different T-shirts were sold at any given time at UT STORE HARAJUKU.
Creating the world’s greatest T-shirt brand
The project involved 34 of Japan’s top artists, photographers, manga artists, musicians, and other creative professionals, who each contributed designs for UNIQLO T-shirts based on a single theme: “Tokyo Now.” Photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, manga artists such as Go Nagai and Takehiko Inoue, and artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Tomoo Gokita, and Keiichi Tanaami let their creativity run wild and produced stunning artwork for a series of tees sold exclusively in New York. This introduction to Japanese culture, initiated by a Japanese company, captured the hearts of New Yorkers and created a storm—the T-shirts sold out immediately. The initiative’s success lent credence to the idea that T-shirts were a communicative medium and that T-shirts were part of pop culture. Two days after the Soho store’s opening, Sato was asked to lead a new project: to create the world’s greatest T-shirt brand.
The name UT was chosen because it was easy to understand and say. For the flagship Harajuku store, Sato decided that the way the shirts were sold and bought needed to reflect a souvenir shop-like aesthetic so it could become a new landmark and tourist destination. This was how he arrived at the “futuristic convenience store” concept. Sato was proven right—30 percent of all customers were tourists visiting from overseas.
2013 UT POP-UP! TYO T-shirts are hung on construction site-like trusses in the UT Pop-Up ! TYO shop. One hundred new designs were prepared just for this temporary shop.
To Ginza, and back to Harajuku
Following the opening of the UNIQLO Ginza Store in 2012, UT Store was relocated to the global flagship store’s 11th floor. In 2013, the world’s largest UT Store—UT Pop- Up ! TYO—was temporarily opened inside the Tokyu Toyoko Line Shibuya Station building just after the station was relocated. The store used the immense 660-square-meter floor space to display and sell over 12,000 T-shirts featuring over 1,000 designs. The shirts were hung on trusses, giving the shop the look of a construction site.
On 5th June 2020, UT Store will return to Harajuku when it opens along with the UNIQLO Harajuku Store within the WITH HARAJUKU complex opposite Harajuku Station. It will become a gathering ground for cultures from around the world: a place like a bookstore or record shop, where you can come in to casually browse and maybe unearth a hidden treasure; a shop that has evolved from a futuristic convenience store into a museum; a shop that reminds the world that T-shirts are a form of very accessible art.
The new UT Store Harajuku will be located inside the UNIQLO Harajuku Store's two floors. It will feature futuristic interiors that incorporate artworks giving it a museum-like aesthetic.