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If most of what Mr. Kinori makes costs a lot (shirts start at $285; pants at $365; and jackets at $525), it is in part because they are produced in such limited quantities.
“It’s not Supreme, it’s not a drop,” he said of the deliveries he announces on Instagram and that sell out almost at once. “There’s a reason for it,” he added. “It’s everything I made.”
The editions are numbered as a form of inventorying and a way of keeping things at a manageable scale. Sales of Mr. Kinori’s clothes grossed him just over a half-million dollars last year, roughly what some designers pay influencers to shill for them. While he maintains a respectable social media presence, his primary means of exerting influence is the handwritten note.
“When you buy his clothes, he sends you a note, not a long one, that he writes himself,” Mr. Baitz said. Often Mr. Kinori’s one employee, Ryne Burns, follows up with an email to see how the purchases are working out.
“It is my small screw you to big companies that can’t number their styles,” Mr. Kinori said.
“It’s the by-hand part that sticks now,” Mr. Baitz explained. What he meant is that, in the era of disposable fast fashion, when the labor required to create things has been effectively erased, when there is always an ugly part of the equation to consider — that of consuming disposable stuff made by an underpaid and invisible work force on the other side of the world — a wholesome alternative may lie in the traditional personal relationship of consumer to maker.
“My design ethos is basically geared toward people not buying stuff all the time,” Mr. Kinori said.
That seems borne out by clients like Kyle King, 33, a clinical social worker who stumbled upon Mr. Kinori’s clothes four years ago at the Reliquary boutique. “There’s so much artifice and false narrative in the marketplace,” said Mr. King, whose wardrobe consists predominantly of garments thoughtfully selected on two annual visits to Mr. Kinori’s shop. “We need to get back to the richness and simplicity of basic, well-designed things.”
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