Japanese brand Sunny Beach House debuts here with its first pop-up of happy clothes

Japanese fashion is not only known for their avant-garde designs, it is just as noted for clothes considered classics, such as denim jeans. Or, everything in a Uniqlo store. One clothier that excels in the tastefully timeless is Sunny Beach House from Tokyo. Last week, the concept casa availed its merchandise for the first time on our shores at their debut pop-up in Takashimaya Shopping Centre, B1. Interestingly, it is sited exactly where compatriot Beams set up their pop-up when they made their brief come-back in 2019. Like Beams, Sunny Beach House is easily identified as a Japanese select store that caters to a certain taste and to a specific audience. In their case, relaxed clothing in colours that enliven any setting, especially one, as the name suggests, on a sea shore.

Sunny Beach House is the brainchild of the 25-year-old retail company Sunny Side Up, primarily known as the distributor of the French bag brand Hervé Chapelier in Japan and, since last November, in our city too. Under the Sunny and Company retail arm, the company operates the Sunny Beach House multi-label store that brings together several small (predominantly) Japanese brands in one space, including the indie Sunshine+Cloud, which is featured in the Takashimaya SC pop-up. Sunshine+Cloud is conceived by the educated-in-America designer-retailer Hayato Takasu, who is based in the sea-side town of Central Honshū’s Hayama, south of Tokyo. Mr Takasu’s store—a lifestyle emporium, as well as a café—is well-known among the folks of his hometown. The media has dubbed it the “Face of Hayama”.

Sunshine+Cloud is appreciated for their “timeless comfortable items”, as Mr Takasu describes his fashion line. The clothing is characterised by the use of natural fabrics such as linen and cotton, and dyed in exuberant sun-drenched colours. At the pop-up, the eye is immediately drawn to a rack of clothes that encircles a pillar: the vivid hues are hard to resist. A staffer who identified himself as a “supervisor” knowledgeably introduced the shirts to us one afternoon. They are made of linen and washed to a comfortable hand feel. We liked that the shirts are proportioned to be worn as an outer. There are also T-shirts, printed in Japan with English words, such as ‘Peanut’ across the chest and ‘Butter’ on the back, and for this wording, there’s a little hula girl embroidery on the bottom left of the front of the tee, just above the hem. The merchandise mix also includes womenswear and charming ‘market bags’ made in good-weight cotton canvas, with text printed on the bottom of the carrier that tell the colour the bag is dyed in—banana for yellow, for example. Sunshine+Cloud puts it simply: “It can be your favorite color or your favorite food.” We were, no doubt, chomping away.

Sunny Beach House pop-up on B1 Takashimaya Shopping Centre is open until 4 February 2024. Photo: Chin Boh Kay