In his atelier in Arakawa, Tokyo, Noriyuki Misawa makes shoes one pair at a time, almost entirely by hand—shoes that can be worn, and sculptural works that cannot. A craftsman who mastered classical bespoke and won gold at an international competition in Germany, he says that good craftsmanship is a given. What he keeps asking is whether something is truly new. WALKER, the boot NICENESS commissioned from him, is carved from leather down to the stiffeners inside. A conversation about the one point beyond a hundred.
Born in Kanazawa, Toshihide Okamoto shapes spaces through plants—though what he really works with, he says, is not the plant but the space itself. That path led him to scent: an invisible material he approaches through instinct rather than theory, layering elements and waiting for time to change them. The fragrance he created for NICENESS EBISU has aged for a year, and now takes a form you can hold—a diffuser. A conversation about making the unseen, slowly.