Vowels and Waka Waka Blur the Line Between Fashion and Furniture

In New York, Vowels unveiled its Fall/Winter 2025 collection through a multidisciplinary collaboration with California-based furniture studio Waka Waka, expanding the conversation between fashion, interiors, and object design into a shared spatial language. Developed through an ongoing dialogue between Vowels creative director Yuki Yagi and Waka Waka founder Shin Okuda, the project explores the increasingly porous boundary between what we wear and the objects that shape how we inhabit space.

Rather than treating fashion and furniture as separate disciplines, the collaboration approaches both as parallel systems of design, each capable of influencing movement, ritual, memory, and emotional atmosphere. Rooted in the Japanese philosophy of Shu Ha Ri, a framework centered on mastering tradition before transforming it, the project embraces familiar typologies while pushing them toward more playful and contemporary interpretations.

The result is a series of custom furniture pieces, including a chair and stool, that reflect the visual dialogue between both practices. Waka Waka’s signature use of cylindrical forms and exposed dowel construction provides the structural foundation, while Vowels introduces a bold chromatic intervention through the use of International Klein Blue, the iconic hue associated with experimentation, repetition, and artistic obsession. Applied to the otherwise restrained forms, the color transforms the furniture into something unexpectedly energetic, almost vibrating against the simplicity of its construction.

Crafted from Baltic birch plywood and maple dowels, the pieces embrace material honesty and reduction, aligning with both studios’ interest in clarity of form. The aesthetic language remains minimal, but not cold, emphasizing tactile familiarity, proportion, and visual rhythm over decorative excess.

Beyond formal design, the collaboration reflects a broader meditation on how everyday objects shape lived experience. Much like clothing, furniture quietly influences routine, posture, comfort, and memory, becoming inseparable from the rituals of daily life. In this context, the project becomes less about product design and more about atmosphere, an exploration of how objects participate in emotional architecture.

Presented across New York and Tokyo while conceptually connecting Los Angeles and Japanese design culture, the collaboration also reflects a wider global exchange of sensibilities. Yet geography feels secondary to the project’s larger ambition: dissolving the boundaries between disciplines to create environments where fashion becomes spatial and furniture becomes deeply personal.

With its pared-back forms, electric chromatic accents, and cross-disciplinary sensibility, the Vowels x Waka Waka collaboration proposes a contemporary vision of design where clothing, furniture, and lived space operate as part of the same expressive ecosystem.