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Even before I met Christopher Hancy, the 31-year-old Australian fashion designer behind BEAUGAN, I could understand why he’d choose to make his home in Tokyo. Each time I visit, I start making plans to move there. To an outsider like me, the city has vast creative depths and seems to encourage exploring them.

Hancy’s family arrived in Australia at the start of the nineteenth century, aboard one of the first ships from Europe. But Hancy looks nothing like the prototypical light-skinned blonde Aussie surfer, and when growing up, he was often asked where he was from. “That’s where my identity problem comes from, I guess,” he laughs. For him, his inability to fit in as a kid partially explains his interest in  how individuals define themselves through fashion, art, and music.

In high school, Hancy wanted to become a doctor but failed the necessary exam. His backup plan was to become a lawyer, but he found solving other people’s disputes boring. He then tried his hand at something completely different by studying fine art at a school taught completely by practicing artists. At the time, however, he thought life as an artist would be full of struggle and unhappiness. Eventually he happened on modeling, which introduced him to the fashion world. “There’s this commercial aspect where everything is deadlines and crunch times to make some kind of product which then they want to sell,” he says,“but at the same time they’re creating a fantasy, so it has the same aspirations as art.” After ten years of experience in fashion, Hancy remains drawn to creating both quality products and beautiful things, but not mere fantasies.

“There are so many young brands and everyone is trying to outdo each other, smashing out over-the-top stuff,” says Hancy. He concedes that there’s a place for spectacle-like work, but he wants no part of over-the-top style. “It’s boring to be doing that. For me, that’s the easy route. That’s the easy way to go, creating this extravagant showpiece stuff because that’s my background.”

Contemporary fashion is intent on “selling a fantasy, selling a dream that doesn’t exist,” he says.“I want to do something more difficult, which is showing beautiful things in everyday life.” That’s why, in early 2017, Hancy created BEAUGAN. He seeks to reveal the existing beauty of the natural world and everyday life, and wants to share this concept with other designers and creative people.

BEAUGAN is Hancy’s vision of “clothing that’s very normal.” To him, “normal” does not mean simple, either in terms of concept or manufacturing. The first collection, Fall/Winter 2017, consisted of 42 separate brown and black variants of 22 designs. Each article’s unique color is produced through dorozome, a mud-dying technique from Japan’s Amami island. The art has remained largely unchanged for 1,300-years, thanks to the island’s distance from the mainland and the Amami artisans’ dedication to sustainability. Tree bark, dried coral, mud, and clay found on the island are used in the different steps of the dying process. Much like denim, Hancy’s dorozome clothing will develop character over time, changing in color and patina depending on the wearer.

Dorozome artisans labor over their materials and garments by hand, and the process has a built-in timeline that cannot be rushed. Hancy wants BEAUGAN to represent an alternative to the fast-paced cycles of flashy contemporary fashion introduced to him during his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. His graduate collection in 2012 consisted of dramatic streetwear-inspired pieces with big silhouettes. It was so well received that each item from the collection was snatched up by a different name in the fashion industry.

When he launched BEAUGAN, these same supporters were confused. “When you compare it to my previous work, it’s much more toned down,” he explains. After graduating, Hancy became disillusioned by the excessive way fashion designers create and the excessive way people consume. He decided to take a step back and rethink what he wanted to achieve. “I didn’t want to become a particular kind of person. I knew how to make all these showpieces, but I didn’t know how to make clothing. I knew fashion, but I didn’t know what goes into fashion.”

BEAUGAN’s Tokyo studio is located in a small upstairs apartment across from a junior high school on a quiet street in Yoyogi, a district sandwiched between the bustling hubs of Shinjuku and Shibuya. The name BEAUGAN is a portmanteau of ‘beautiful’ and ‘bogan,’ Australian slang for someone who’s rough around the edges—or as Hancy puts it, “an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status.” The term used to have a stronger negative connotation but has since evolved into a term used light-heartedly between friends.

One source of inspiration for Hancy is ankoku butoh, a Japanese dance form created by Tatsumi Hijikata in the late 1950s as a reaction to the postwar fascination with Western culture. Hijikata wanted to resurrect the idea behind kabuki theater, which traditionally was entertainment for everyday people and similar to television soap operas. Unlike noh theater, which was for the elite in Japanese society, kabuki was for everyone. “Hijikata wanted to recreate that spirit of the man and woman on the street,” Hancy explains. “He was inspired by his grandmother walking through the mud when she was planting rice, working the rice field hunched over. He saw this kind of movement, this painful, slow, struggling movement, as something that’s beautiful.”

For Hijikata, ankoku butoh was the opposite of the ethereal lightness idealized by ballet. It’s about human struggle on Earth depicted as something beautiful. “It sounds horrible, but the world is a struggle. We have to live through the world somehow, through the struggle. He was being pure to that in a way,” Hancy explains. He’s inspired by its popular roots: “it’s born from the dirt. It comes from people themselves and their ingenuity.”

With BEAUGAN, Hancy wants to put something out in the world that’s beautiful and desirable in a way that isn’t gimmicky or excessive. “I want all the design processes to be there for a reason. There’s a reason the shape is cut like this or the pocket is assembled like that. Everything is really thought out,” he says. Like anoku butoh, BEAUGAN is “born from the dirt”: the dorozome process means the garments are literally transformed by mud. All the choices Hancy makes are intentionally focused, as much as possible, on origins. He starts his design process by thinking about the needs and life of the wearer, rather than envisioning a final surreal photo campaign or fashion week presentation. “I really think about the person that’s going to wear it,” he says. “I think that’s something that fashion has kind of lost.”

Hancy takes a philosophical view of clothing. A person’s identity begins with the way they think, he says. Next, if you’re religious, it’s a person’s spirit. After that comes the way we perceive ourselves physically. And the last layer, coming between our physical perception of ourselves and the rest of society, is clothing.

“We always actively engage with, ‘Who am I hanging out with? Is this person a good person or a bad person? Am I being a good person? What’s . my relationship? How’s it working out?’ We stress about that,” Hancy says. Clothing is the layer that comes between ourselves and other people. “It’s like an amoeba. This kind of cellular organism has a cell wall that allows things to go in or out. The way we dress ourselves is like how we define that cellular wall.”

BEAUGAN is built around this view. “I feel that if we can be responsible for who we are internally, then we can be responsible for who we are externally. Why don’t we think about clothes in the same way?” he asks

His belief that clothing is a part of one’s identity resonates most strongly with people outside but adjacent to the fashion industry: writers, graphic designers, architects, photographers, artists, and small business owners. Hancy wanted to create clothing for a new market not already targeted by the industry. Fashion, as he sees it, has a long history of telling people that they can’t be themselves, and now people are pushing back. “Why can’t I just be me? Why do I have to be a pop star or look like a magazine image? Why is it valuable to be someone else?” He sees choosing clothes as a creative process. “You can really bring the most out of yourself. You can create yourself visually, which is a beautiful thing.”

Living in Japan has let Hancy recreate himself. He tells me he could live anywhere but finds Japan’s history and philosophy especially beautiful and interesting. “I’m glad to be in this situation, because it gives me so much fluidity and the possibility to move in different groups. I can be whoever I am. There’s a freedom of not being burdened,” he says.

In Japan, Hancy is figuring himself out first—away from places that would have more expectations on his behavior. “By investigating things historically, here or in Europe or wherever, I can start to work out how to do the same in regard to Australian history, or my own history,” he explains.“I’m trying to learn about myself through learning about others: other cultures, other groups of people, what others are doing.”

Freedom to form an identity independent of the expectations of history is an idea Hancy wants to unite other people under. “It’s building a community, really. Every group that creates some culture, they want that,” he says. “If you don’t have an identity, you want to find your global family.”

He seeks people who think the same way he does, rather than those who look similar or work in the same profession. “Since the beginning, I’ve had a desire to create a global tribe of people who are like-minded and share the same ideas, the same way of thinking. I want to make a base for that. And I really want it to be a space to encourage creativity, encourage collaboration, and have the idea of exchange.”

BEAUGAN’s designs are imbued with the belief individuals have to create their own identity. They also the embodiment of Hancy’s search for beauty in the natural world. In the future, he hopes BEAUGAN will be a community exchanging ideas to create culture in a way they can’t find elsewhere. “I want substance and I want quality,” says Hancy. “I created a brand to achieve that. Hopefully, I’m getting there.”

Media Partner: MAEKAN

Contributor: Charis Poon
Photographer: Stanley Cheng