THE REAL DEAL | Americana collector Hitoshi Tsujimoto, founder of high-end workwear brand the Real McCoy's, in his Kobe headquarters among a few of his approximately 100 Warhols.

Imagine going into an espresso bar, as I did in Tokyo, ordering a single shot, and being told that it’s not on offer. The counter at No. 8 Bear Pond may feature the shiniest, spiffiest, newest La Marzocco, as well as a Rube Goldberg–esque water-filtration system, but the menu, which lists lattes and Americanos, makes no mention of espresso or cappuccino.

“My boss won’t let me make espressos,” says the barista. “I need a year more, maybe two, before he’s ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I’ll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos.”

Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe’s owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond’s main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.

Such obsessive—some might say insane—pursuit of perfection, in coffee and cuisine, clothes and comforts, isn’t unusual in Japan: In a tiny tapas place in Kyoto, while drinking perfectly poured cañas—small draft beers—and eating deep-fried croquetas de jamón, I reach for a napkin, which turns out to be just a thin sheet of waxy paper that doesn’t so much absorb oil as push it toward another, cleaner, part of my hand.

“I think these are Spanish napkins,” Gonzalo, my Bilbao-born companion, says in disbelief. It’s almost too ridiculous to think that anyone would import such a shoddy implement from halfway around the world. But the owner of this restaurant tracked down these servietas, priced them out, shipped them in, and stacked them up in custom metal dispensers, all because, in one frustrating wipe, they re-create the experience of consuming tapas in a packed barroom in Spain. Whether or not the diners appreciate this is beside the point.

Toru Matsui, a salesperson at NYLON, one of Tsujimoto's Kobe stores, wears a varsity jacket from the label.

It used be that the Japanese offered idiosyncratic takes on foreign things. White bread was transformed into shokupan, a Platonic ideal of fluffiness, aerated and feather-light in a way that made Wonder Bread seem dense. Pasta was almost always spaghetti, perfectly cooked al dente, but typically doused with cream sauce and often served with spicy codfish roe. Foreign imports here took on a life of their own, becoming something completely different and utterly Japanese.

During the robust economy of the ’80s, Japan’s exports ruled, and the country would import the best that money could buy from the rest of the globe, including Italian chefs and French sommeliers. Which made Japan an haute bourgeoisie heaven where luxury manufacturers from the West expected skyrocketing sales forever.

But now 20-plus years of recession have killed that dream. Louis Vuitton sales are plummeting, and magnums of Dom Pérignon are no longer being uncorked at a furious pace. That doesn’t mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They’ve just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards, realizing that the apex of bread making may not be Wonder Bread–style loaves, but pain à l’ancienne.

Japanese chefs are now cooking almost every cuisine imaginable, combining fidelity to the original with locally sourced products that complement or replace imports. When they prepare foreign foods, they’re no longer asking themselves how they can make a dish more Japanese—or even more Italian, French or American. Instead they’ve moved on to a more profound and difficult challenge: how to make the whole dining experience better.

SEEKING PERFECTION | Katsuyuki Tanaka, owner of No. 8 Bear Pond, requires his baristas to train for at least a year before they can serve espressos.

As a result of this quest, Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.

For many years, before Japan opened itself to the world, the port of Kobe was one of the only places in the country where locals could view the styles, hear the music and taste the food of foreign cultures. It’s here, in a cavernous industrial building, where Hitoshi Tsujimoto rules his men’s fashion empire, the Real McCoy’s, specializing in better-than-perfect versions of classic American clothing, everything from James Dean–style red windbreakers to denim cut like it’s 1955. (He also owns seven Real McCoy’s stores and three NYLON stores in Japan.)

Tsujimoto’s obsession with American clothing began on a 40-day road trip across the U.S. in 1978, when he was 18. He brought home jeans, athletic jerseys and sweatshirts, and sold them at a swap meet in Osaka. The Japanese vintage industry was just beginning to boom; he soon opened a small used-clothing shop in Amerikamura, an area of Osaka that became a magnet for U.S. fashion and youth culture.

Retro Americana on display at the Real McCoy's Tokyo shop.

None of this would be particularly surprising—blue jeans, college sweatshirts and other American fashions were then popular the world over—if not for the fact that Tsujimoto and others like him would go on to design and construct versions of iconic American wardrobe staples that are far better than anything now, and probably ever, made in the U.S. These designers didn’t open their businesses to beat Americans; Tsujimoto started the label because he wanted to sell the best vintage clothing in the world, but the good old stuff was running out. His solution was to make his own flight jackets, chambray work shirts, loop-wheeled cotton sweatshirts and selvage blue jeans.

“The biggest innovation in clothing history was the invention of jeans,” Tsujimoto says, standing in a stockroom filled with his denim. “It’s the garment that conquered the world.” But with jeans, as with everything Tsujimoto makes, it’s not about merely imitating classic styles. “It’s not so difficult to make something that’s 100 percent the same as the original,” he says. He holds up a heavy, metal zipper, American-made new old stock. “I’ve got 500,000 of these. Enough for the next 40 years.

SIGNS OF THE TIME | Keisuke Tomiya, a salesperson at NYLON, wears a jacket inspired by Robert De Niro's in "Taxi Driver".

“But the key isn’t just getting the details right—it’s knowing when to change things,” Tsujimoto continues. “My style has to be an improvement: With 1 percent more here, 2 percent less there, we create something that looks better. You have to change the fit because all these classic garments were designed with extra room to carry tools or weapons.”

He takes a deerskin-lined flight jacket off the rack and points out the colorful American military design stitched onto the back. He passes me what appears to be a standard-issue ’50s-style gray cotton sweatshirt until I actually touch the thing. The heft of the loop-wheeled cotton makes it the thickest, heaviest sweatshirt I’ve ever felt.

These kinds of items might suggest that Tsujimoto aims for a young, casually dressed clientele, but his price point tells a different story: The jacket retails for about three grand, the sweatshirt $250. “My customers are guys age 30 to 50 who grew up obsessed with this kind of clothing,” he says. “They bought American stuff at thrift stores when they were younger. Now they’ve moved on to my stuff.”

That Tsujimoto dissects the details of great American clothing of the ’50s and then brings that style to life again in new and better ways indicates the extent to which the pure, unadulterated power of obsession drives brands like the Real McCoy’s. But it also signals something else: Tsujimoto is the poster child for a highly specific Japanese male subculture, and it’s the connection to this subculture that drives his customers to spring for $350 jeans in the midst of a two-decade recession.

The view outside Tsujimoto's Tokyo store.

Tsujimoto’s clothes have been featured in Japanese men’s magazines like “Lightning” and “Free & Easy,” which are categorically different from anything in the U.S. or Europe. The November 2011 issue of “Lightning” weighs in at a whopping 482 pages, while November’s “Free & Easy,” at a more modest 290 pages, devotes 42 of them to the World Navy Blazer Championship.

There’s a reason J.Crew men’s stores in New York City now sell these magazines even though they’re without English translations: These fashion bibles reveal just how much more educated and sophisticated Japanese consumers are than others in the world. These publications don’t just help readers understand the subculture they want to be a part of, but they also explain in fetishistic detail why garments like Tsujimoto’s are the ultimate expression of that identity.

Though many Japanese foodies and critics deride the Michelin Guide for a perceived ignorance of traditional Japanese food culture, the publication of the first Red Guide to Tokyo just four years ago signaled a tectonic shift in the international culinary scene. In the latest guide, 247 of Tokyo’s restaurants have stars—almost four times the number in Paris, and more than the total number in London, New York City and Paris, pointing to the spectacular appeal of this city to foreign palates. (And it’s not just Tokyo: The Kansai region also has more starred restaurants than those foreign cities combined.)

THE RIGHT STUFF | Tsujimoto's vast collection of artifacts includes a poster for "The Towering Inferno," globes, vintage signs and hundreds of T-shirts.

It’s no surprise to see the top ranks of Japan’s Red Guide populated by tiny sushi bars and extravagant kaiseki restaurants, but each year there are also more and more non-Japanese restaurants earning stars for their creative cooking. One of Tokyo’s three-star establishments—an honor awarded to only 15 restaurants in the main cities of Europe but to 16 in Tokyo alone—is Quintessence, which serves contemporary French food created by a young Japanese chef named Shuzo Kishida.

The place, located in the tony, mostly residential district of Shirokanedai, is small, inconspicuous and unpretentious—everything that three-star restaurants in France generally aren’t. The heavy black menus offer no dishes, only a short manifesto from the chef explaining that he will choose what we eat. After taking away the menu, the maître d’ returns bearing two small white bowls containing goat-cheese bavarois, made from Kyoto goat’s milk.

The soft pillows of stark white cheese, topped by off-white macadamia slivers, are ringed by bright yellow olive oil. The cheese has the texture of the softest tofu and just a hint of tanginess from the goat’s milk. Cut by a dash of pure olive flavor, complemented by the crunch of the nuts, with just a few flakes of sea salt on top, the cheese is transformed from something rich-tasting and farm-fresh into a rounded, subtle and complete dish.

When the maître d’ pours a glass of sweet, crisp French white wine to go with the next offering, I ask him why he wears so many hats in a restaurant that could afford to take on more staff. “If I just manage this place but don’t serve dishes, then what’s the point?” he says. “I want to see exactly how each customer responds to what we put before them.”

CUISINE ART | The entrance to the Tokyo restaurant Quintessence.

He comes back with the dish that matches the sweet white: Quintessence’s take on a traditional boudin noir tart. In the center of a gray slab of slate sits a small rectangle of thin pastry, topped by a layer of fruit compote and a coating of deep-black blood sausage, with a dollop of foie gras. I cut off a corner and spread on a tiny dot of yuzu sauce, a paste made of a Japanese citrus fruit mixed with pepper and salt, which brings the disparate elements of the dish together in an original, fresh, spicy way.

Later Kishida joins me for a coffee. Thirty-seven and slightly built, he carries himself in a way that manages to be both authoritative and humble. After we discuss the details of the dishes, I ask him about what the maître d’ told me. “I bought this restaurant myself just a few months ago from the group that owned it since it opened,” he says. “I did that for one reason: to cook how I want in a way that connects me to each customer. I refused to make this place any bigger. I need to personally taste every single dish that leaves my kitchen.”

The concept of tiny restaurants that rely on personal interaction is firmly rooted in Japanese tradition. So, what’s special about what’s happening at a place like Quintessence? Like many chefs in Japan, Kishida traveled to France to apprentice and spent years there perfecting his craft.

According to almost every non-Japanese chef I’ve spoken to, Japanese chefs, even those cooking non-Japanese cuisines, are the most highly trained and technically adept in the world. Patrice Martineau, a French chef now in charge of Peter restaurant in the Peninsula Tokyo, put it this way: “I’m living the dream of every French chef I know. I have an entire kitchen staff of Japanese working under me. There’s no one in the world who works harder, faster, better.”

When Japanese chefs finally return home to cook, the restaurant business gives them a kind of auteur status that’s virtually unheard of in the rest of the world. Cesar Ramirez’s Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, which was recently awarded three Michelin stars, famously seats only 18. But there are hundreds of such tiny non-Japanese restaurants in Tokyo alone, and many thousands more Japanese places.

COCKTAIL HOUR | Trainees Yoshinori Tanaka and Tatsuya Yoshida at Tokyo's Star Bar.

By keeping their spaces small, their staff skeletal and their selection limited, they have the chance to develop their cuisine without the financial pressure of a larger business. Even when these ventures succeed, as Quintessence most definitely has, their aim still isn’t to serve hundreds of guests a night. All of which indicates something different—and better—about dining in Japan: Whereas Gordon Ramsay and other superstar chef brands seek to expand and conquer the city, the country, the world, the goal here is to connect a chef with the people he’s feeding.

It’s brunch time on Saturday at the Peninsula Tokyo, and a line of dark-suited men and kimono-clad women suddenly assemble inside the hotel’s entrance. Moments later an ancient Rolls-Royce pulls up front and a bride dressed in a extravagantly decorated Shinto wedding dress climbs out and steps slowly through the lobby, carefully balanced on her wooden zori. At the end of the receiving line stands Malcolm Thompson, the hotel’s general manager, who bows and then claps with the wedding guests. Flanking the British-born Thompson are a couple of elegantly attired Japanese men who look like boardroom presidents but spend their days in the lobby greeting guests. “We realized early on,” Thompson says, “that some Japanese guests felt intimidated if everyone working at the hotel was much younger than them, so we hired older gentlemen to make them feel at home.”

GRAND HOTEL | The Peninsula Tokyo's chief doorman Yoichiro Nagumo prepares to greet a guest back from a run.

While Japanese-run restaurants, labels, stores and bars have come to dominate the scene, in Japan’s high-end hotel business, foreign brands rule. Yet what’s interesting is that they haven’t thrived by simply imposing their outside vision of luxury accommodations on Japan. The Peninsula Tokyo (whose parent company is based in Hong Kong) has been successful, Thompson explains, by incorporating deep Japanese hospitality into its model. “In other parts of the world, I would have to train staff on how to behave toward guests,” Thompson says. “Here, that’s the kind of knowledge every Japanese employee already possesses on an almost instinctive level.”

In many cities around the world, hotels cater to so many foreigners that it matters most to deliver high-level, albeit generic international hospitality. But the Peninsula, with a client base that is now about 60 percent Japanese, was forced to adopt native customs. The formality of Japanese culture takes a subtle yet distinctive form at the hotel. Upon seeing a guest returning from a run, a doorman outside radios in so that just as he crosses the threshold, the runner is greeted with a bottle of water and a hand towel. “That’s omotenashi,” Thompson explains, “a kind of hospitality that involves anticipating what your guest needs.” Which is the simplest explanation of what a great hotel is supposed to do.

There’s no way for anyone to ever get to know all the great bars of Tokyo,” says my friend Nick, a spirits expert who’s been living in the city for 10 years. Looking around the city’s drinking mecca, Ginza, it’s easy to see why: The blocks are filled with multistory buildings housing three or four bars per floor. “There are hundreds of buildings like this just in Ginza,” Nick says. There are bourbon bars that stock more stuff than anywhere in the Bourbon Belt, bars that serve only drinks made with the freshest fruit, others that have perfected one thing, such as Rockfish, where the whiskey highball craze that recently swept Japan found its most perfect expression.

Then there’s Star Bar. There are flashier bars, showier bartenders and places with edgier offerings, but owner Hisashi Kishi is a bartender so masterful and revered that fellow bartenders are often too intimidated to enter his place. It’s small, of course, and the lighting and music are just right. But what it all comes down to here is how Kishi works to transform ingredients available to every good barkeep into cocktails that are colder, brighter in flavor and sharper in the balance of sweet, alcoholic and bitter tastes.

Assembling a Manhattan, he carefully maneuvers each ice cube into the tumbler and then pours everything by eye, decisively, smoothly, without spilling a drop. He stirs as if mesmerized by the motion, tastes his creation, nods an OK to himself and pours the brown liquid until it reaches the rim of a glass. It’s only slightly sweet, with a hint of bitters, chilled as cold as can be. But what’s really so different about this Manhattan? After a certain point of technical perfection, don’t cocktails just come down to set and setting, like the LSD gurus used to say?

Despite winning a worldwide cocktail competition, Kishi decided to remain a junior bartender rather than open his own shop right away. “There was more to learn,” he says. This devotion to craft becomes especially interesting when Kishi reveals that many of Japan’s top bartenders can’t drink much themselves. (About 40 percent of East Asians lack the enzyme to process alcohol.)

Star Bar's owner-bartender Hisashi Kishi, winner of many domestic and international competitions, works his magic.

It’s this embracing of bartending as a vocation that makes Japan’s bars better than those anywhere else in the world. There’s also the hyperspecialization encouraged by the fact that bars can be so small—and that almost every narrow pursuit can find enough customers to at least break even. But maybe the central reason this city is so amazing for drinkers is that the quest to find the best is, by definition, a Sisyphean task. “And the thousands of bars I have to hit along the way to that impossible goal aren’t too bad either,” Nick says.

The most obvious proof that Japan is fast becoming the best place in the world to eat, drink, shop and sleep is that America is starting to import non-Japanese wares from Japan. Six years ago New Yorker Gordon Heffner, who had worked in the Garment District for a decade, and his Japanese business partner made a bet that Japanese denim was so good, despite its expense, that Americans would come to covet it. The two opened SoHo shop Blue in Green, which stocks only Japan-made jeans, as well as the Real McCoy’s clothes. Now they’re not just successful, but they also have competition in what seems to be a niche market. And Japan’s best designers are even migrating to our shores: One of the most acclaimed boutique brands, Engineered Garments, is helmed by Japan native Daiki Suzuki but manufactured in New York City. Suzuki, also head designer for Woolrich Woolen Mills, brings a distinctly Japanese sensibility to traditional American attire.

High-end consumer culture in Japan survived 20 years of economic decline and has actually become much better, in critical terms, though also less profitable than it was when Japan, Inc., ruled the world. The Japanese, animated by the principles of perfection, specialization, craft and obsession that they have long brought to their own culture, have applied the same standards to Basque cuisine, Rhum Agricole cocktails, American-style outerwear, and almost everything else wondrous and obscure from the rest of the world.

And while the Japanese have done an admirable job of exporting their native cuisine and culture, perhaps the next challenge for their flagging economy is to learn to export everything they do best. While some of these ventures do well financially, others just seem to hang on. Japan’s superior cocktails, cuisine, clothes and hospitality deserve to catch on globally, but who knows if they will even continue to last in Japan. Which is precisely why this is the moment to visit.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

In today’s fashion world of corporate ownership, design by committee and mass production and sales, Belgian designer Dries Van Noten is an anomaly. Since he launched his brand in 1985, the 53-year-old Van Noten has lived and worked in Antwerp, avoiding the fashion capitals circuit except for his shows in Paris.

He produces womenswear and menswear, and only twice a year—no pre-collections, no resort wear, no home wares, no jeans or perfumes or hotel decors. “Personally, I think there is too much fashion in the world,” he says, sitting in his sparsely decorated office overlooking the city harbor on a cold autumn afternoon. “Now you can go on style.com or blogs and there is always another collection launch, cruise, resort, accessories, and on and on and that’s a pity. For me it’s an overdose.”

Unlike a good many of his fellow designers, he is modest, soft-spoken and rather uncomfortable in the spotlight. He is not the sort to host trunk shows in big department stores, walk the red carpet or pal around with celebrities. He rises at 5 a.m. and works quietly and diligently, overseeing everything from design to the tissue paper that his clothing will be sold in. Van Noten spends his evenings dining at stylish local restaurants, such as Hofstraat 24—run by his friends, chef Roman Drowart and Laurence Van Bree—or at home. He shares a 19th-century manor with beautiful grounds outside of Antwerp with his business and life partner of 25 years, Patrick Vangheluwe, and their two-year-old Airedale, Harry. “It’s a busy job, what we have here,” Van Noten admits. “But we try to enjoy all three—fashion, house and garden—every day.”

Van Noten is known simply for his clothes, and is loved for his clothes—a style that looks complicated and studied on the hanger but is, in fact, quite modern and easy to wear. Because of this, he has engendered a cultlike following: women who wear “Dries” (pronounced “drease,” like please) are uniquely loyal to the brand. When you say you’re wearing Dries to a fellow follower, it’s almost like you are speaking in code about intelligent, artistic design.

Unlike most major luxury brands, which often sell as much in accessories as they do in clothes, Van Noten’s ready-to-wear accounts for more than 90 percent of his sales. He doesn’t advertise, and he doesn’t publish or reveal sales figures, but reportedly does an estimated $70 million in sales a year—a small amount compared to megacorporate brands such as Gucci, Prada and Hermès that rack up several billion dollars a year in sales. “I’m very happy with the size of the company as it is right now,” he insists—blasphemy in today’s $200 billion–a-year luxury fashion industry—adding boldly, “I don’t have to grow.”

Then again, and most importantly, Van Noten owns his company, an increasing rarity in luxury fashion today. In the last 20 years, most designer-run luxury brands have either listed on the stock market (like Ralph Lauren) or sold to corporate groups such as LVMH or Gucci Group or to private equity firms. Among the handful that remain independent are Giorgio Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Oscar de la Renta and Sonia Rykiel.

The surge in growth in the last decade in luxury fashion has made it financially difficult for a young designer to launch a brand and for long-time independents to remain that way. “I’ve always worried that if I sold the company I’d lose my liberty, my freedom,” says Van Noten in proper English punctuated with fluttering Flemish R’s. “When you see what has happened to others who sold to groups, not everyone was very happy afterward.”

It’s a way of running a business that luxury executives and MBAs consider downright old-fashioned. But remaining independent suits Van Noten and his lifestyle just fine. It allows him to keep an eye on just about everything that bears his name. He meets with many of his retailers personally in the showroom and explains the collection, which Marilyn Blaszka, co-owner of Blake in Chicago, notes, “is unusual.” What’s more, he listens to their opinions and takes them into account when designing the next collection. “I think he wants to know and is pleased to know how people wear the clothes,” Blaszka says.

Though Van Noten does only four collections a year, he works incessantly, taking only four or five days of vacation a year. He adores Antwerp and is proud of the city. Anyone who comes for a visit receives a guide to the city that he put together of his favorite addresses. He often visits the Plantin-Moretus Museum in the old city center, with its burnished leather paneled rooms, romantic walled rose garden and collection of pre-1800 printing presses and books; he stops by Goossens, the tiny artisanal bakery on Korte Gasthuisstraat, for sugar bread, which he brings to the office; he trolls flea markets and antique shops to collect tin objects; he takes in art exhibits and particularly loves Francis Bacon, Russian Constructivists and the Flemish masters.

“To go to exhibitions, to talk with people, to think, to research. That is the fantastic part of our job,” he says. “For me, the most fun is the trip to create something that I really love. To do four women’s collections a year? Forget it. You have two months, three months, click, click, click”—he snaps his fingers—”it has to be done, finished, next. Some designers make their show collection in two weeks. This, I don’t like.”

Instead, Van Noten focuses solely on spring/summer and fall/winter for men and for women and produces an astounding 1,200 designs for women and 800 for men—double the majority of his competitors. “I like to make a lot of clothes!” he says with a laugh. And, Blaszka reports, they sell “very, very well.”

You can’t have a business that loses money and money and money,” Van Noten says. “When you have an investor, you can do that. But when it’s your own money, you can’t. I tried always to be very careful financially.” He attributes this habit for fiscal responsibility to his upbringing.

Van Noten grew up in Antwerp, the youngest of four children of a clothing merchant and a stay-at-home mother. Van Noten’s father had a fashion emporium 20 miles outside of town, “a destination store, which was a new concept back in the early 1970s,” he explains. Throughout his teens, he spent weekends working in the store and during breaks from his Jesuit school he accompanied his parents on buying trips to Milan and Paris. It was understood that Van Noten would eventually run the store.

When it came time for college, his parents gave him the choice: business school or fashion school. He found business “boring,” and chose fashion, enrolling at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. A month into his studies, he recalls, “I told my father, ‘I love designing so much I don’t think I’m going to take over the company. I want to be a fashion designer.’ And he became so angry. He said, ‘If that is the case, you can study what you want, but I won’t pay for it.’ ” Van Noten picked up freelance design gigs for an assortment of companies, including a children’s wear brand and Donnay tennis, to pay his way through school.

At the Royal Academy, he met classmates Ann Demeulemeester and Dirk Bikkembergs. The students had ambition and used their connections to launch their careers. Van Noten had a men’s jacket manufacturer and shirt manufacturer who were willing to produce clothes for him, so he designed a small menswear collection. “Dirk Bikkembergs had a contact of someone who made shoes, so he made men’s shoes,” Van Noten says. “And Ann Demeulemeester knew someone who made sunglasses, so the first thing she made was sunglasses.” In 1986, together, along with Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee, they pooled their money, put everything in a van, drove to London, rented a showroom space (which they divided into six) and presented their collections to retailers during fashion week. They were a hit and became known as the Antwerp Six.

Van Noten’s first client was the famed retailer Barneys New York, his favorite store at the time. Van Noten was so nervous about the meeting, he says, “I ran away!” Christine Mathys, Van Noten’s former boss at Donnay and his new business partner of sorts—no one really has a title at the company, he says—stepped in and handled the sale. Barneys bought Van Noten’s menswear but sold it as womenswear.

In the early years of his business, “everything was hard, of course,” he says. “But the hardest was the commercial and distribution side, to pick the right clients and to get your money. In the 1980s, you had a lot of stores you had to be in to be seen but didn’t always pay. Susanne Bartsch, who had a store downtown, bought an enormous quantity of our second collection, of Harris tweeds in pinky pink. She accepted the first part and didn’t pay, so we didn’t deliver the second part. I can still see the racks of pink Harris tweeds hanging there.” (When reached for comment, Bartsch said she couldn’t recall.)

In 1989, a prime retail property came up for sale in Antwerp: the Het Modepaleis, a five-story fashion emporium built in 1881 that sits on an acute corner, like the Flatiron building in New York. Van Noten renovated the place, overseeing every detail, from buffing the original bronze and mahogany fittings to the choice of curtain fabric. It’s a habit he continues today: He decorates his stores himself, furnishing them with antiques and artwork that he and Vangheluwe find on eBay and at auctions. Looking back, he says, buying the Modepaleis “was one of the best things and the most stupid things I’ve ever done.” Best because the space is a gem and solidified Van Noten as a serious fashion brand. Stupid, he says, because “it nearly killed the company [financially]. But we survived.”

Two years later, close call No. 2 came: the Persian Gulf War. Most fashion companies lost a great deal sales-wise because American retailers slashed their spring/summer 1991 orders as the country went to war in January. Van Noten experienced that and more: “That season,” he says, “I made the collection inspired by Iraq and Iran”—having conceived and designed it before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As it happens, he says, “we have a system where jacket names begin with a B for blazer, and skirts are with an S for skirt, so that season the blazers were called Baghdad, the skirts were called Saddam, and so on. All the shipments to New York were blocked in customs because the papers were filled with names of cities of Iraq and Saddam.”

“That,” he says quietly, “nearly caused us bankruptcy.”

He recovered well enough that two years later he staged his first womenswear show in Paris, in the Hôtel George V’s ballroom. He imported white mattresses and pillows from India and set them on the floor for editors and retailers to sit on. The models, wearing big flowery prints, walked the all-white room to Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” The reaction was so enthusiastic, Van Noten remembers, “it was scary.” The result: “More clients.”

That bubble lasted only so long. When the minimalism movement of Jil Sander, Helmut Lang and Miuccia Prada seized fashion in the late 1990s, Van Noten found himself struggling again. “We were doing a lot of rich prints, fancy things, as everything became more minimal and conceptual,” he says. At the same time, corporate groups such as LVMH, Prada and the newly formed Gucci Group began buying up small, independent fashion companies like Van Noten’s as well as major fashion suppliers. “Our shoe manufacturer group was bought by Armani, our heel manufacturer group was taken over by the Gucci Group and our last manufacturer was taken over by the Prada group,” he explains. “Of course, when those people buy those companies, you are not the first served. We thought: Do we still have a future if we don’t join a group?”

Eventually, he decided to talk to the big fashion groups, to listen to their pitch. He didn’t like what he heard. “I made it quite clear that it was not so much my thing,” he says. And that was that.

He felt the impact of his decision immediately. “We lost all our German clients in one season,” he says. “They were told by the big groups, ‘If you buy this line you must buy this other line—it’s the whole package or nothing.’ And our customers told us, ‘Sorry, we don’t have the budget for all of it,’ and kicked us out.”

He soldiered onward, doing the clothes he wanted to do, selling them to the retailers he had long-standing relationships with, such as Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman and Blake, working with people he likes in a place he loves. A decade on, it has paid off. Today he has nine free-standing stores around the world, three of which, in Antwerp and Paris, he owns, 450 other points of sale and about 110 employees.

Remaining independent has allowed Van Noten to evolve at his own pace. Take, for instance, the fabrics he chooses for his collections, most of which are made exclusively for him up to a year in advance. This fall, he used a high-tech fabric from Japan that looks like tapestry. Two years ago, he had village women in remote Uzbekistan weave fabric that was carried by mule for a day and a half to the local DHL office to be shipped to his studio in Antwerp.

For his spring collection, Van Noten collaborated with a young British photographer, James Reeve, on a digital print of city skylines. Van Noten sliced up the printed cottons and silks and combined them with pieces of other printed fabrics he had made, of the jungle, the sea, 18th-century Italian landscape etchings and botanical drawings of roses, to create a sort of fabric collage in 1960s Balenciaga–like silhouettes. When he presented the collection during Paris Fashion Week in October, it was, as always, resolutely modern and feminine. Women’s Wear Daily called it “mercifully calm.”

They might as well have been describing Van Noten and his company. For 25 years, he’s done exactly as he pleases, with all its ups and downs, and as he reflects on it, he remains as serene as his surroundings. “We all have our ideas and our dreams,” he says as he gazes out his bay window at the pleasure yachts in the still port below. “It’s important to have your dreams. But,” he adds quietly, “I’m very realistic.”