INTERVIEW | Through norbit, Hiroshi Nozawa Sees the Forrest
The Hudson River School is neither fish nor facility. It’s a group of painters - Americans, mostly from New York - who saw the forest as more than the trees.
Words: Alex Rakestraw
Photo: Ryosuke Misawa (Portrait) & HOYE (Product)
As the Romantic movement peaked in the mid-19th century, artists like Albert Bierstadt traveled the reaches of North America, seeking inspiration in the wild. They didn’t paint what they saw when they saw it. In the moment, they merely sketched. They then went back to their city studios, thousands of miles away, letting time ferment what they saw into grander dramas.
Hudson River art does not present the most accurate depictions of nature (per the Met: “the earliest references to the term were... disparagingly aimed”). What it presents, instead, is beauty. The sort that stirs the soul. That makes millions travel miles just for a glimpse. It is Humboldt’s vision of nature: a completeness that can only be felt, and not analyzed.
Hiroshi Nozawa is at home in this vision. Nozawa (neither painter nor American) is the designer behind norbit, an apparel line making some of the world’s most finely-crafted technical wear. A norbit garment is a busy intersection: between urban and rural, past and present. Quite literally, between man and nature. The brand’s 3-Layer Harris Tweed Jacket – a laser-cut, highly functional waterproof layer draped in English tweed and shaped for a country gentleman – embodies this best. Handmade in Japan, it’s the work of a master. A slimline heritage field coat with the muscle of a modern alpine jacket. There is natural inspiration. And through Nozawa, there is completeness.
The Age of Exploration [background]
This completeness begins in rural Hyogo – a Japanese prefecture famous for the beef from its capital, Kobe. Hiroshi Nozawa was born here, the oldest of three brothers. The Nozawa family lived in the countryside outside Kyoto. Hiroshi, a self-described “sports-minded boy,” found a “playground” in the neighboring mountains, exploring their caves instead of studying.
During this active, adventure-driven childhood, Nozawa discovered more than his local forest. He also discovered his interest in clothing. “As far as I can remember, I had a full-zip white windbreaker with storable hoodie,” describes Nozawa over email. “Putting the hoodie in storage, it looked like a stand-up collar. I really liked its function.” His love of nature and function-wear would become his career.
Throughout our exchange, Hiroshi Nozawa revealed little about his illustrious past: how he got started in design, the brands he helped build, even the origin of norbit. Here is only the summary. Nozawa has designed for Fjallraven, Puma, New Balance, and the Japan-only Columbia Black Label.
Most recently, he was at Snow Peak, helping launch the brand’s first-ever apparel collections alongside CEO Lisa Yamai. norbit – Hiroshi’s personal project – began in 1999, then went on hiatus until 2018. He was still designing for Snow Peak as he revived his own brand with a full collection.
Over a career spanning decades, Nozawa has designed everything from outdoors performance gear to urban sportswear, all for some of the world’s biggest brands. In fewer words: he has personally left a mark across the whole of functional fashion. And yet, like Brendon Babenzien (formerly, CD of Supreme; now, the designer-activist behind Noah), it may be his newly-revived personal line where his presence is truly felt.
The Invention of Nature [process]
Every norbit garment begins like a Hudson River painting: with romance, then sketches, then finally, art.
For Nozawa, the design process is rooted in memory and inspiration. He first imagines a nature scene, often one rooted in his own time outdoors. These scenes are sensory portraits – more meditations than postcards. A visit to a winter-frosted Monument Valley is remembered as “mental detachment”: a “view of the valley at the evening time” and “the simplest music in the world” that “echoed to my own five senses.” From these immersive images – sometimes, quite literally, from Nozawa seeing the forest come the inklings of ideas.
“I imagine a scene in my mind, and try to have a vision what kind of clothes are suitable for that situation,” he explains. “At this moment, the designs are just vague images. The next step is drawing a sketch to express the images in a real form.”
“Making these rough drafts is the most creative process and takes the most time”
Placing his “own ideal self” in the richness he imagines, Nozawa pulls from his technical design experience and a vast knowledge of vintage garments to swathe his avatar in “clothes as tools.” From these moments of inspiration come sketches. Endless, iterative, sketches.
“Making these rough drafts is the most creative process and takes the most time,” comments Nozawa. Unlike a big brand, there’s no merchandising data to turn the designer’s canvas into a paint by numbers. Only when Nozawa is satisfied with the freehand “rough draft” – when the drama of his mind’s eye has crystallized without restraint – does production begin.
The Map and the Territory [his approach to design]
Bierstadt used oil paints to make his visions real. Nozawa, a craftsman of a different sort, fleshes out sketches with a different palette.
“I describe transcendental beauty to translate into textiles,” he states. And because his scenes of transcendence happen in nature – for example, in the chill of a desert night in the American Southwest – the textiles Nozawa uses are technical in nature. Their expression, however, is decidedly analog.
The core of a norbit collection is a term borrowed from the natural sciences: “hybridity.”
Nozawa: “’Hybridity’ is well-balancing in the following key words: good old days, cutting edge functional materials, evolving cities, unchangeable nature, relaxed manner and practicability.”
In practice, it means that technical garments should not be clammy matte black spaceships. They must be “well-balancing” – in how they affect the wearer, and in the effect they present when worn. On classical menswear shapes like a duffel coat, this means drip-feeding utility with tailoring front of mind. On performance garments like a three-layer shell, this means smoothing the edges through clever patterning and a deft use of fabrics. “Military, work and hunting clothing, they tend to look very hard. I try to add curved lines and stitch works to make my clothes more soft and mellow. This is the big point of norbit’s design work. I make effort to describe well-balanced beauty - rocky stretches, forests, lakes and sky being in harmony with one another - by my design work.”
This analog approach shines bright in norbit’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection. Dissatisfied with the “lack of depth” in most synthetic performance textiles, Nozawa dove head first into garment dying. He wanted technical clothing with more completeness, more emotion. It would be expensive. But there was no other way to bring his sketches to life.
“Generally speaking, it is very difficult to control qualities for nylon garments to prevent risks such as unevenness in color and reduction ratio. For these reasons, many brands avoid this technique. However, I used it to possibly describe the ‘primitive taste’ with my clothes.”
Nozawa is not the first to use garment dying in high-end technical apparel. Nor is he the first to merge organic textiles with synthetic performance fabrics. In fact, what may be called the Japanese school of technical apparel – practiced by brands like nanamica, F/CE, and of course, Snow Peak – is almost defined by this merging of the old and the new.
And yet, norbit presents something all its own.
If you focus on the hard facts – waterproof ratings, the provenance of tweeds – the line is impressive enough. But forget the taxonomy. Nozawa’s natural inspiration and obsessive approach to craft combine to make shapes more dramatic, lines more refined, than his contemporaries. There is art here: an acommercial purity reflected in the stitching (and the price tag) of a norbit garment.
It’s the vision of Nozawa - finally, en plein air.
Words: Alex Rakestraw
Photo: Ryosuke Misawa
Product Photo: HOYE
