A Master of his Craft and Culture - Meet the Bandanna Almanac
Bandannas have been a workwear staple since the beginning of time. Their versatility as a textile made them a valuable asset in any laborer’s pocket.
However, as time moved on, bandannas became less prevalent as a functional tool due to other technologies emerging. Regardless, their allure and aesthetic have persevered despite a lack of traditional usage.
One of the oldest Bandanas known to men by John Hewsons
Jonathan Lukacek is an American-born “Bandanna Shokunin” whose mission is to preserve and promote bandanna culture to its fullest extent. He is a keystone in the fashion world and brings together all sorts of like-minded creatives.
His copious amounts of knowledge and ability to build bridges has made him one of fashion’s most essential playmakers. His blog, The Bandanna Almanac, covers the latest and greatest when it comes to bandannas, denim, Kapital, and a variety of other topics as well. His online store is a collection of high-quality pieces that him and his collaborators have developed with an immense attention to detail and purpose.
Lukacek also worked closely with Kiro Hirata on a number of groundbreaking projects. He spearheaded Kapital’s Elephant Brand Bandanna Museum, a two-story exhibition of some of the most historically important bandannas. It captures over 100 years of history and is located next to the Kapital store in Okayama.
His knowledge and passion for Japanese denim were also a critical part of the development of Kapital’s iconic Century denim. Aside from that, Lukacek is working on a video series called CC:me, which showcases some of Japan’s finest independent stores. He also plugs a variety of different big-name clients that have a passion for Japanese fashion… Where do you think John Mayer gets all of his Kapital?
Jonathan Lukacek in Tokyo
With Lukacek having such an interesting perspective and such an impressive resume, Sabukaru’s editor in chief Adrian Bianco had no other choice but to interview the genius behind The Bandanna Almanac. Our Sabukaru Indonesia/Tokyo team also shot a small editorial which will give a quick insight into Jonathan’s creations before the interview starts.
A Sabukaru Editorial: “The Almanac in Tokyo”
Can you please introduce yourself to the Sabukaru network?
Jonathan: My name is Jonathan Lukacek, I’m originally from the States but I’ve lived in Japan for fifteen years. I’ve done Bandanna Almanac, the blog, for like ten or twelve years. Through that, I’ve met a ton of individual craftspeople whom I try to introduce on my blog and that really inspire me for the most part. When I introduce myself, I always introduce the people that I know and that I work with because they are essentially a part of me as well. I build bridges, basically.
So if the blog is around ten years old, were there any other blogs back then that were doing the same things you were doing?
Jonathan: I don’t think there’s anyone else doing similar work to me. I kind of try to avoid doing anything that anyone else is doing.
I guess you probably now have a die-hard community.
Jonathan: Because I live here, I’m not really sure of the actual reach of my community, but when I go to the States, people will show up to pop-ups that I contribute to and buy the bandannas that I design. Usually, I get surprised at how many people react to it. There’s not a lot of communication though.
So out of all the countries, why Japan, and especially why Osaka?
Jonathan: Well when I was studying abroad, I studied in Kyoto, but that was only for like three months. When I first came to Japan I came to the Kansai area. The Kansai area stuck with me. It’s kind of like where you first land really. If you like it, you’re going to stay there pretty much forever.
I didn’t go to Tokyo for like the first three years I lived in Japan. When I first came to Kyoto, the old buildings and everything about it was what I fell in love with. I went to Osaka on a side trip and I learned that its sister city was Chicago, which is pretty close to where I’m from. The way people talk and the mannerisms and the food culture there is pretty similar to where I’m from. Not on the surface obviously but when you think about it a little bit it’s pretty similar.
So why Osaka? Probably because it’s not the most obvious place to live in Japan, it’s not very foreigner friendly. It’s also in the middle of the country so you can kind of go anywhere within reasonable time.
So we heard that you work in a Kapital store and you sort of consult with them and help them with designs. Can you tell us the connection you have with the brand and how this all started?
Jonathan: So I was first introduced to Kapital through Eric, the photographer for the catalogues. I met Kiro for the first time when I met Eric for the first time. When I first met Kiro I just kind of started introducing ideas to him because that’s what I do when I meet people. That was like 7 or 8 years ago.
At that time I introduced the idea of combining Indigo and Kakishibu on a fabric. My friend had made this accurate Edo era textile that farmers used to wear. The farmers used either Kakishibu or Indigo because that’s all they could make at their house. That was all that was permissible for workers, but it was beautiful. It was done in stencil-dyed, resist-dyed patterns. Just gorgeous. I was like, “that could make very contemporary clothing if someone applies it in the right way.”
From that conversation, Century denim was born. Soon after that, Kiro invited me to go to the release. Our relationship continued to grow and eventually, he asked me to do the Bandanna Museum. He also asked me to work for the Osaka store when it opened so I ended up working there.
Jonathan, Kiro and Eric
Where did your passion for fabrics and dyeing techniques and Japanese fashion come from? Was it something that you have been interested in for a long time, or something you discovered in Japan?
Jonathan: I didn’t really know about Japanese denim. I was kind of confused as to why everyone was so interested in it. The more I read about how carefully and obsessively Japanese craftsmen work, I realized that Japanese craftsmen are way more interested in the entire craft of fabric making rather than just denim or whatever.
I even feel that today, denim they can sell but it’s not necessarily their love or their craft. I think they’re always looking for something beyond that. It’s almost the idea of kinoubi, which is the beauty of function in Japan. Denim is a very functional thing for Japanese people, you can use it for any type of clothing. Japanese craftsmen usually stick to staples, they’ll stick to a handful of “ingredients” and they’ll just maneuver with that, they won’t go grab something new for some crazy idea or start on something else. They’ll just stick to the foundation.
The industrial weavers in Japan usually base everything around cotton since Japan has had a huge cotton industry. The Japanese were making military uniforms before they were making denim. The funny thing is, most people who are obsessed with Japanese denim don’t realize that Japanese denim is not from American denim. They actually had railroad worker clothing that they made with their own denim in Hiroshima in the late 1800’s through the 1920’s. Japan had already had its own denim production but it was usually hemp and cotton, not 100% cotton. But still, even the farmers had to use this hemp and cotton thing because the balance of the two is very important for costs because cotton was super expensive in Japan anyway. I think the original Japanese denim, the functional denim, was really cool stuff. You can probably find it at flea markets here but it’s very intense, it’s very rough.
How Japanese Denim is Made
So you work as a consultant, do you help other brands as well?
Jonathan: Well I actually have my own bandanna brand, which has been around for two years and I just started a project this year called One Ear Project which is an artist based “bandannas as canvas” type of project.
Besides that, I work with stores that are going to open in The States or elsewhere and I help them coordinate with brands that I have connections with. If they want to stock a certain brand and they don’t know how to contact or network with them, I try and start that connection. It’s not an easy thing to do because most of the time these craftsmen live in remote areas or they just simply don’t want to have their product in a different store so it takes a lot of convincing.
So let’s talk about the big elephant in the room, the bandanna. How did your love and passion for bandannas start?
Jonathan: That’s the most difficult question, I never have a good answer for it. Bandannas for me are like the most mysterious textile because they’re everywhere but at the same time they’re nowhere. They’re not really a fashionable thing. In the fashion world we have Hermès making silk scarves, and we just sort of have this bourgeois scarf and handkerchief market which is dedicated mostly to this elite arena of menswear and womenswear.
Bandannas are at the heart and soul of fashion because if you’re talking accessories, they can be used for anything. They are pure function. The patterns on them are also really beautiful because they all originated in India. They all come from this one area of India that does really small tie-dyeing with dots and lines. How it moved around the world is interesting and how it stayed in working class areas.
The patterns excel to the silk and western luxury market but somehow that cotton fabric stayed in the working class section. It’s always been a staple because no matter what, people in fashion have always used handkerchiefs.
Kani Kashmir Bandan
Why do you think bandannas are currently so popular, especially in Japan?
Jonathan: The resurgence of bandannas in hip hop and streetwear really made it more mainstream. You had brands like Supreme putting bandanna print on their clothes. There were also a ton of vintage bandanna collectors in Japan which kind of started the hype behind them here. I think the hype in Japan over bandannas boomeranged back over to The States and to Europe and now there are a ton of brands using bandannas.
ASAP Rocky in Loewe
Since so many brands are making bandannas and using the bandanna pattern, is there such a thing as a “fake” bandanna or just in general, a wrong way going about using bandannas and bandanna print?
Jonathan: I don’t think you can do a “fake” bandanna. The problem I see with bandannas is that people are doing really simple designs and they’re not really applying any art to it. I’d rather see people doing beautiful designs.
People aren’t really pushing the envelope at all when it comes to bandanna art. That’s why I wanted to do replicas and then after doing my own replicas, I wanted to do my own artistic inspired bandannas. There are people doing really cool original bandanna patterns but unfortunately, they still look like other bandannas.
There’s that basic Paisley pattern that everyone follows and a lot of the time it’s also too much of a novelty. They’re either giving them away, or selling them for almost nothing and to me that’s kind of pointless. Why even make it then if you’re going to hand them out like that? There’s so much to bandannas if you actually put some effort into it.
Kapital Bandanna with unconventional pattern
What would you say are the essentials to a good bandanna? Imagine your grandma’s cooking you soup and the soup is a bandanna, what are the key ingredients that need to go in the bandanna-soup?
Jonathan: I think it’s the same as Japanese denim, selvege. If we’re talking about a staple, a standard, how to set the bar, selvege fabric is the best and it denotes a certain quality. It shows that you at least went out and looked for fabric. It’s not just some random handkerchief fabric. When you do selvage fabric you have to set the machine up right. You have to care because the shuttle has to be set a certain way and there’s limitations on how you can do shuttle woven fabrics. Selvage is a very sensitive fabric. It’s completely different from regular shuttle loom fabric.
For me, the shuttle woven fabric is important. The other thing is I think that people are doing discharged bandannas too much or silkscreen. There’s so many other printing techniques that can be applied that are available to pretty much anyone. I found a place that prints the traditional Japanese way which is by using screens but it’s not really with regular screens. They call it Han in Japanese because they’re really big. They’re done from digital but it’s kind of an analog process because it’s being etched out. The end result is a very natural, organic looking print.
Are there any rules to the pattern of a bandanna?
Jonathan: I don’t think there are any rules necessarily. I think people should explore the art and I think that there should be a format to a bandanna, but it shouldn’t be the same pattern over and over again. If people are using Paisleys on everything, it’s always the same Paisley! They always use the same one. It’s so boring.
I just wish people would just use more of their own creative ideas instead of just a Paisley. You could pick one bandanna and I could make 120 variations of the same bandanna and none of them would even look similar. It could be like with Grateful Dead t-shirts, they’re all similar but each one is also unique. However, you know that they’re all drawn from the same source but they’re totally different.
Let’s talk about your own brand, when did you start doing your own bandannas?
Jonathan: So we started a year ago but the fabric took about ten years to develop. Japanese manufacturers are a little bit hard to deal with and again, creating a relationship and convincing someone to take a loom and dedicate it to making only one fabric is really really tough.
I got lucky and after looking for a long time for standard fabric, I found someone who would be willing to make custom fabric. I wanted to make something that was not on the market which is a smaller, narrow, fifty centimeter by fifty centimeter double-sided selvage bandanna. Even in the 1800s they had this size, but it quickly disappeared because it just didn’t make sense. When you can print two bandannas on one piece of fabric and cut it in the middle and then cut it again, you can get two out of each print cycle. Printing them one at a time is cool because each one is slightly different, which I love.
Can you tell us about your process from start to finish?
Jonathan: So first, I have a lot of friends that are collectors and so I’ll source a number of different bandannas with them. For example, one of the bandannas we’re doing right now is sourced from a corner of a bandanna I found. From that, we had to redesign the entire thing because this bandanna’s original size is way bigger than our fabric. We had to take out some elements and then replace and reorganize the whole thing so that it fit on the fifty centimeter by fifty centimeter canvas. So for that, there’s a lot of work in the digital aspect.
The designs have to be simple because they have to transfer to an analog source. If you do it as a raster file, you lose everything in a complex file. If you use Adobe Illustrator you have to hand draw and go crazy on it. It’ll come out and it won’t be able to be printed. You’d need like thirty or forty screens and that would cost a couple grand.
If you do a more simple thing like a vector file, you can do it in six or seven screens. You’d have each element and you’d have to do it carefully. The designs from the 1800’s are pretty straightforward. They used plates or cylinder printing. When making a replica, what we do is we break down these designs and then digitalize each step. In the case of an 1800’s bandanna, you’d have to think how the designer originally etched the designs out on plates and then you’d have to take those elements, take them apart, and then redraw them by hand.
How many people are out there that still carry around this knowledge?
Jonathan: Probably not that very many people. Well actually, there’s a university in Glasgow that has a museum that carries all this information. They have an archive that has original swatches and everything. They’re probably the biggest source of knowledge when it comes to authentic era turkey red bandannas.
Glasgow had a major bandanna industry. They were basically the largest manufacturers of bandannas in Europe and probably in the entire world from the 1820’s to the early 1900’s. Unfortunately they went out of business by the 1970’s.
Do you realize that with your blog, you’re contributing to keeping it all alive?
Jonathan: I’m really trying to. There’s no one source for bandanna history and I’ve always wanted to write a book about it. If anyone’s reading this and wants to contribute financial support, I would totally do a book on the entire history of bandannas haha. But yeah, I’m really just trying to keep the information and knowledge I know and share it with people so that they can either carry it on and add to it or learn from it so that they can create their own designs and stuff.
So where can we buy your bandannas? Is it just on your website or are there any other places as well?
Jonathan: Well I was doing sales from my own website but I don’t think I’m going to be doing that for a while because of how the Coronavirus has kind of changed e-commerce being handled from Japan. Doing overseas shipping has become very costly. For now it’s going to be wholesale. However, if you live in Japan or if you know me, I can sell door to door but that’s not really the case for most people.
I also saw that you are designing and selling other clothing on your website. Can you tell us a little bit more about this collection?
Jonathan: The collection is an idea I’ve been working on for a long time. I work with so many people and I have all these ideas, but if I execute them all at once using the same factory, it’s quite stressful and costly. This was something I tried to space out and time correctly.
All the clothes on the website are collaborative pieces. There’s a bag that’s made by a girl from Singapore. She makes bags and reworks sneakers like Air Force Ones and stuff. She makes them really crazy. There’s a brand called Cottle whom I collaborated with on some hoodies and some pants. They’re an in house manufacturer so they can do small lots.
I also have an office in Osaka whom I’m producing really small runs, like five or six pieces of stuff with. It’s by order only, kind of a reservation system. There’s this guy who makes it all by himself in the same office space and we did a shirt together. We’re working on some other stuff too. I also worked with this guy in Australia who makes hats. He’s usually known for making era-accurate 1920’s-1950’s baseball caps. He made a bunch of outdoor caps for me, Patagonia fitted 5 panel, 6 panel hats. He used this canvas duck fabric from Japan. Another guy who is a friend of mine is making that. But yeah, with the collection I really wanted to do a non-seasonal line and have specific drops kind of like a magazine article. I would work on the drop over a period of time and then release it.
Pants made in Collaboration with Cottle
Hoodie made in Collaboration with Cottle
We talk about all these important things, bandannas, Kapital, etc. I kind of believe that stores play a very important part in all these stories, what do you think is so important about stores?
Jonathan: In Japan, there’s this idea of Omotenashi, which roughly translates to hospitality in English, but it’s a lot deeper than that in Japan. It’s like thinking ahead of your guest or your customer. When a customer comes into your store, they need to know that you are a valuable asset when it comes to their purchases. It’s not like you chill out or hang out at your store, you need to make an active effort to form that relationship and that friendship with the customer. The customer needs to trust you with their “buying-power” basically. The customer goes to your store to get what they want, not what you want to sell them.
When stocking your store, you need to think about your customers, not all of them at the same time, but the majority of them. You should try and give them what they want, but also something that they’re not expecting. Stores in Japan and especially in Osaka are very competitive in this regard. There are so few apparel stores when you’re competing against a huge fashion hub like Tokyo, stores in places like Osaka have to think way differently. When I find a brand, I try to go to stores instead of searching the internet. I want to hear the retailer’s buying story and some inside information that I won’t get online.
Jonathan and John Mayer
Do you have any stores to recommend for readers who are planning to come to Japan?
Jonathan: In Osaka, there’s a store called IMA:ZINE which is run by this buyer from BEAMS, his name is Tani. It’s a very youthful streetwear type of store that you would see in the USA, but the store is more like a magazine issue. It’s constantly evolving and the staff are super engaging and friendly. The store isn’t in a shopping area, it’s in an offset neighborhood but it’s a cool neighborhood nonetheless. The whole shopping experience is cool, it’s very open and inviting. You don’t really feel like a customer, you feel like you’re part of a little community.
How much subculture is behind bandanna culture? We live in the year 2020 and a lot of people are saying subculture doesn’t really exist anymore. Would you say that you are still living and working in an active subculture?
Jonathan: I think culture is maybe too broad of a term to use. It’s more like metaculture in a way. It’s beyond culture at this point. It’s borrowed culture from borrowed culture. The new bandanna cultures are descendants of those subcultures.
If you look at Rick Owens, what he’s making is a descendant of punk and bondage fashion and people don’t really notice that. People will say “skater fashion” or “street fashion” and to me those are like blank terms.
When you look at Virgil, it’s not “street.” The feel he tries to go for is that kinetic keyboard feeling you get when you’re learning how to type on Word and you’re putting text on a page, but instead of on a page it’s on a garment. I think the young people don’t get it, they see that everyone’s wearing it but they don’t see that kinetic connection. The connection between kinetic text and digital that they’re trying to do.
How important is it to you when walking past the Supreme store or any other contemporary store in Harajuku, that customers know the backstories?
Jonathan: Curation is the most important but to be honest, I don’t think the average person really cares about what they’re wearing. They just want to look like somebody or dress a certain way. That’s not fashion though that’s just consumerism. People who are into fashion though, are fans of fashion. The cool thing about fashion is that there’s no absolute cool. You can wear whatever and there’s probably going to be people that think what you’re wearing is a cool look. If you look like whatever the magazines are trying to sell you, I think you’re losing out on a huge chance to find out what you really think is cool.
Supreme x TNF Paisley collection from FW14
Please tell us more about your video series CC:me. What is it about and where can we watch it?
Jonathan: So I have a YouTube channel called bandannaalmanac where you can watch it. The series is called CC:me because the idea comes from chainmail.
When I was young we had chainmail where someone would mail a letter and everyone would write something else on there. When it would get to you, you wrote your own little message and then sent it off to another address. I didn’t want to do a self curated “I’m interested in this” type of channel because there’s enough of those out there and they’re all based around sponsorships which I find insincere.
I wanted my channel to be as sincere as possible. When I started, I talked to the guy who runs IMA:ZINE and I asked him, “could you introduce me to a store?” He recommended me a store and then I asked the owner of that store to put me on to a different place. Like chainmail. I have no clue where I’ll go next. I went from IMA:ZINE to a lighting store, to a plant store, to a book store etc. It doesn’t really have an audience yet because there’s not any travel going on yet and nobody can really come to Osaka, but when travel opens back up I want to create a directory for stores that the stores I’m going to actually care about. The connection isn’t about me, it’s about them. I just want to showcase how closely connected all of these stores and people and places actually are.
Our magazine is on one hand for people who know about the fashion world. However, a lot of our readers are also people who are just getting into fashion and are reading about these topics for the first time. If there are readers who want to get more into bandannas, are there any other resources besides your website where they can get that information? Are there any places you would recommend for people to get their first bandanna?
Jonathan: For someone’s first bandanna, I would just go out and look for Elephant bandannas. There are tons at thrift stores and I would recommend to collect as many as you can for as cheap as possible.
Don’t buy anything expensive or spend too much on ebay unless you can buy in bulk and get like a hundred in one box. For research, all I really did was what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, which is looking through old encyclopedias and other analog references that haven’t been digitized. When I started researching bandannas that were made in America in the late 1800’s, I first started with resources that were digitally available. I used Google to start that chain reaction.
After searching, I found a historic society in Rhode Island and I just called them up. I asked them if they had any information on bandannas or handkerchiefs because they were from a town where they were manufactured, and they said that they did! They sent me scans of stuff that I never could have gotten. With a lot of these places though, they won’t even answer the phone so sometimes I get a friend who lives near the location to do some scouting.
To be fair, I have had the luxury of knowing a lot of fellow collectors who are dedicated. A lot of them will go into old silver mines and gold mines to find jeans and bandannas. They’ll ask me about a ton of designs they find and they’re bandannas I’ve never seen before. Mike Harris, the Jeans of the Old West guy, sent me a bunch of bandannas for the museum. They had these crazy obscure designs. Stuff like that leads you down other rabbit holes to follow. If you really want to learn about bandannas on your own, check the stacks at your local library. Those are all the old books they take off the shelf. They have no reference numbers so you have to look through them all yourself which takes a lot of dedication.
When we look at your work, there’s an almost 15 years old blog, your brand, museums you’ve worked on, the other clothes you’re doing, and now the video series. What’s the next big step for you?
Jonathan: I want to make a brand that’s entirely dedicated to Sashiko fabric. Fabric that’s stitched for judo or karate. Woven Sashiko fabric. The idea is kind of like Porter Classic except I don’t really want to get into fashion like that.
I want to remake comfortable clothing using wovens not knits. I also want to work with Cottle more. I love the idea of an everyday uniform. Instead of collecting more and more stuff, I want to minimize my closet to where I’m almost wearing the same thing every day. I want to try that as an experiment. I think for me, I wouldn’t want the Steve Jobs jeans, New Balances, and turtlenecks haha. Nothing lazy, I was thinking something different.
I want to reduce because I want to challenge the fashion world itself. Will people be interested in what I’m wearing or will they not be? I just want to test whatever status quo I don’t like and see where it goes.
1 of 1 pieces by Jonathan that preview some of his ideas for future creations
What’s your opinion on big brands using bandannas?
Jonathan: I think they can do whatever they want but I don’t think I need to spend over $100 on a bandanna. I also wish they would take more care in the design process and the reduction process.
I’m not a big fan of discharge printing because I think that when you bleach anything it kind of ruins the fabric. That type of printing is just for cost saving. Big brands are just trying to cut costs. They’re not trying to save the environment, they don’t give a shit about their carbon output, and the consumer ends up paying more for less.
With the printing process that they do, the consumer loses a lot of value. Buaiso makes a discharge printed bandanna but first they dye it in indigo and then they discharge print it. How could you take out all the hard work you did? I would use Katazome which is stencil dyeing and resist dyeing instead of ripping the color out of the fabric. Discharge printing is not a textile skill, it's a textile technique. There’s no skill involved.
But yeah, overall I just wish people would take it seriously instead of just trying to make a buck off of it. At least add your originality to it. Put a little bit of your character in your design instead of spitting out a bandanna because it’s trendy. I think that’s what’s ruining fashion. Everyone’s kind of copying each other. Luxury brands are not creative or luxury for that matter. Luxury to me is the creative process that was put in there. When you buy an expensive painting, you’re buying the creative process right? There’s value there, someone put creative energy into the painting.
I would happily see people move their production to Indonesia or another developing country that has cool traditional textiles, hire local artisans, pay them however much they ask for and make really cool bandannas. It can even be discharge printing, I’d give up on that part just to see original makers making and advancing their craft. Instead of appropriating Native American designs, hire an actual Native American designer to produce those designs.
So for the final classic question, where do you see the bandanna culture heading? Will it get bigger? Will it stay as niche as it is? Do you even care or are you just enjoying it and kind of going with the flow?
Jonathan: No I really really care, actually. I want the bandanna to become a multifunctional utility boost that’s not just for one specific subculture. The Heritage Jeans community I really can’t stand. They appropriate things that they have no business in. They try to make it seem as if it’s strictly denim fashion.
I think bandannas can be worn by anybody because anyone and everyone used to wear bandannas. I want to go back to using handkerchiefs and that sort of thing. I think after the Coronavirus, people will care more about combining hygiene and aesthetics so instead of using creepy rubber gloves to open a door, one could use a bandanna. People don’t even realize how useful bandannas are. I challenge anyone, the readers, to try to use a bandanna for as many things as possible. I am sure they will realize that it is an indispensable tool. You can have one textile you use for everything.
Bianco: thank you a lot for your time
Interview by Adrian Bianco, Text by Koko Bond-Razak
About the Author:
Koko Bond-Razak is a seventeen-year-old creative based in Washington, DC. When he’s not working on schoolwork and college applications, he’s building his skills as a freelance writer and videographer.
Credits for Editorial:
Photographer: Adianto
Models: Ama Gigi, Raken Hassim
Styling: Vloqee
