GOD SELECTION XXX, the Tokyo brand Jungkook wore to soundcheck in Lima

Photo: Instagram

GOD SELECTION XXX has been a Harajuku fixture for thirteen years. Here is what it is, who makes it, and what it costs.

Jungkook wore a long-sleeved T-shirt by the Tokyo label GOD SELECTION XXX at BTS's soundcheck in Lima this week, during the group's three-night run at the Estadio San Marcos on the ARIRANG tour.

The Perfume Photo Graphic Long Sleeve Tee retails at ¥24,200 including tax, around £108, on the brand's own English storefront, in black and white across sizes S to XL.

Photo: Instagram

Photo: God Selection XXX

GOD SELECTION XXX was founded in 2013 by Yasunari Miyazaki, who started it while he was still a university student. He was born in Tokyo in 1989 and grew up around Omotesando, and the brand has never really left that few hundred metres of the city.

Its signature product is a graphic T-shirt built around a photograph of a cultural figure, reworked with the brand's own artwork on top. The approach has been there since the first season and is most of what people recognise it by.

What justifies the price is underneath the print. The brand knits its own body from yarn supplied by Albini, the Italian mill, using American extra-long staple cotton, which gives a smoother, denser hand than the blank a graphic tee would normally be printed on.

Miyazaki is also half of a second label that explains a lot about the company he keeps. In 2019 he launched SEQUEL with Hiroshi Fujiwara, the fragment design founder who shaped Ura-Harajuku in the 1990s, and the two run it together. SEQUEL is sold through GOD SELECTION XXX's own Harajuku shop.

The two have kept working together since. In November 2023, GOD SELECTION XXX, fragment design and CASETiFY released a joint run of phone cases and tech accessories carrying the brand's tenth-anniversary artwork alongside fragment's thunderbolt. This year, for the thirteenth, fragment and GOD SELECTION XXX put out anniversary T-shirts at ¥16,500. They sold out.

Elsewhere the brand has worked with the Number (N)ine archive, which Miyazaki has said came from wanting to get at the Takahiro Miyashita pieces he grew up on, and with Converse Addict and C.P. Company.

Scarcity is part of how it operates. Japanese trade coverage describes the brand as carried in only a very small number of shops even domestically, and the Harajuku store is where most of it surfaces first.

For a UK buyer there is no stockist. The brand's English-language store prices in dollars and ships internationally, which is the direct route, and the Japanese multi-brand retailers that carry it include B'2nd, part of the listed TSI Holdings. Pieces also circulate on Grailed and eBay at around $196, though the house rule applies there as everywhere: nothing bought on a resale platform comes with the brand's guarantee.

SOURCES (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

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