In 2025, it can feel like menswear brands release new product every day, if not every hour. But menswear buyers—those highly dialed, incredibly discerning folks who decide what hangs on the racks of your favorite store—still live and die by the seasons. Every winter, they fly to New York, London, Milan, and Paris to ogle the collections, place their orders, and then wait—some more patiently than others—to receive them in time to swaddle their customers for fall.
Which, funnily enough, is the moment we find ourselves in. At this very second, retailers across the globe have unusually deep stock of some of the season’s most covetable pieces, making it the best possible time to shop the fall collections. These circumstances really won’t last forever, so to help you get a highly-informed head start, we called up the buying minds behind some of our favorite independent retailers—NYC’s Colbo, LA’s Departamento and Mohawk General Store, Canada’s HAVEN and Lost & Found, as well as the crack shopping squad at Nordstrom—to learn what menswear brands they’re proudest to have in-house this season, and which specific pieces they’d urge you to try if you were kicking it with them on the floor.
Kevin Carney, Cofounder, Mohawk General Store
Mohawk General Store, in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, is on something of a tear right now. This summer, it doubled the size of its men’s space on Sunset Boulevard, clearing room for even more expertly-sourced menswear grails. One example is the new, sizable collaboration between Studio Nicholson and Beams Plus, which Mohawk cofounder Kevin Carney says felt so special, he did a special build out in the store to showcase it. Essentially, “Studio Nicholson took its usual silhouette, and applied it to Beams Plus’ slightly more traditional garments.” The result is an “Ivy, preppy look, but with a boxy silhouette”—including an “insane” brown cord suit, shirting with Studio Nicholson’s typically luxe hand-feel, and some cozy loop wheel sweatshirts.
On the more tailored side of the spectrum, Carney is energized to have something a little different from the Issey Miyake universe—IM Mens Issey Miyake—after years of carrying only the beloved PLEATS PLEASE line following the dissolution of Issey Miyake Men. Pleats, he says, has always done well, but as a staff, they’d become somewhat used to it. “Now this new line, which just launched, is a great change up, and really has its roots in the original pieces Issey made in the Eighties.” And don’t worry, Pleats Please lovers—if you look closely you’ll see there’s even some pleating on the two designs below.
Jian DeLeon, Men’s Fashion Director, Nordstrom
DeLeon—who worked at Highsnobiety (and GQ) before taking the reins of the Nordstrom men’s universe—is particularly excited to be bringing LU’U DAN to the midtown monolith this fall. “I met Lu’u Dan designer Hung La [a longtime veteran of Balenciaga and Celine] a long time ago in a Paris showroom, where one of his earliest collections was inspired by Asian-American movie villains like Tsang from Rush Hour,” DeLeon remembers. Since that time, DeLeon has continued to be impressed by La’s “subversive, punk-inspired graphics and avant-garde design sensibility,” which come together in brightly colored pieces—like the two below—that he says stand out mightily on the shop floor.
He’s also proud to be bringing in Morjas. The upstart Swedish shoemaker’s pairing of modern design with classic menswear details will be familiar to some of you already, but Nordstrom is actually the brand’s first ever retailer with an offline space: In short, you can now try Morjas before you buy. “Morjas makes great shoes at a great price,” DeLeon says. “You can’t ask for much more than that, but founder Henrik Berg seems to have mastered the art of over-delivering.” He points to the Ivy Loafer as the first design of theirs that caught his eye, but says that as “more men experiment with different takes on pared-down slip-ons,” the Belgian is his new favorite.
Andrew Dryden, Cofounder, Departamento
This year, Departamento is stocking Evan Kinori for the very first time. Keen GQ readers will be familiar with the cult-favorite designer already, but Dryden says the garments—which Kinori limits to a small handful of pieces per style—represent “something that was missing” in his store previously. Specifically: A more artisanal designer, and one that can be easily, handsomely worn by customers of all shapes and sizes. Dryden adds that he’d been aware of the buzz around Kinori for some time, and that the two had spoken for just as long, but says it wasn’t until the designs were right in front of him, at a meeting early this year, “that I could really understand what the magic was. Having it in the shop has been a real pleasure.”
DPTO has also welcomed John Alexander Skelton in this season. The brand, which has developed a cult following in recent years simply for the amount of buttons it hand-sews onto its designs, is the sartorial equivalent of a dusty folio filled with archival photographs from rural Britain’s past. It’s been on Dryden’s radar a while—”I remember first seeing it and thinking, ‘What’s with all the buttons, man?’”—but earlier this year, he felt the offering had simply become too good to resist.
Trevor Schrader, Head Buyer, HAVEN
Beyond growing the HAVEN brand, the Canadian team continues to focus on bringing in the highest quality, most thoughtfully-designed menswear it finds. This fall, two Japanese designers are front of mind for head buyer Trevor Schrader. First, A.Presse, the Shibuya-based brand that’s been driving menswear nuts all year, and which HAVEN was the first retailer to stock outside of Asia. “I’d been circling it for a while, but I was floored by the craftsmanship once I got to Tokyo and saw it in person, instead of through a screen,” Schrader recalls.
Having worked for the store for 19 years, Schrader says at times you can get “a little bit jaded and fatigued,” but that discovering A.Presse was a rare moment of pure excitement. The founder, Kazuma Shigematsu, describes himself as an Otaku (essentially, a geek) Schrader adds, and takes that approach to the apparel. One example? The brand’s Converse rework—a “total hybrid of the best different elements of Converse designs from a bunch of decades.”
Schrader’s second callout is to Ssstein, which he says is starting to gain a similar momentum. “One of the things that drew me to them first is just the drape of the clothes,” he says. “They work with some of the best materials in the world, but the shape and silhouette is really the signature, and that’s rare these days.” While he sees the pieces easily living in the “quiet luxury” universe, he says that unlike a lot of the similar-looking brands that fall under that moniker, Ssstein’s shapes make it unique.
It also doesn’t hurt that in their Paris showroom “all the guys are dressed in it and look effortlessly cool—very relaxed, very comfortable, but also clean and sophisticated at the same time.”
Tal Silberstein, Cofounder, Colbo
Last year, Tal Silberstein, the cofounder of Colbo, a multi-brand boutique on the Lower East Side, told us about his pride to be carrying designers like Cawley, Another Aspect, and Yoko Sakamoto. That hasn’t changed, but this season, there are a few more to add to that the list. Top of mind is Kanemasa Phil, a small, independent Japanese brand he says is “so chic, beautiful, and elegant, and the most quiet luxury it gets.” (He compares it to The Row, but “at a price for the normal person.”) The secret sauce, he says, is a combination of “the most luxury-feeling fabrics,” and then “really old-school, Japanese production methods.”
He’s also jazzed about his order of O by Jan Jan Van Essche, a new-ish project from the popular Antwerp designer. Silberstein says he’s always felt in sync with the designer’s own retail space (Atelier Solarshop, which GQ wrote about a few years ago) but even more so this collection. Noting that Colbo is the project’s only New York stockist, he says there’s a “natural connection” between their two visions, citing “the oversized natural colors, natural dyes, unisex fits, and seasonless, all-purpose designs” as similar to the ones Colbo produces. But he adds that O, which started a decade ago, is “super elegant, and very chic.”
Michael Fong, Buying Director, Lost & Found
Michael Fong, buying director at Toronto’s Lost & Found, says that the key signal of a brand’s popularity internally is the amount of personal orders his colleagues place for it. This fall, the most-ordered award went to the store’s new Japanese addition, Niceness. (Fong was wearing the brand’s Innes submariner jacket, below, on our recent Zoom.) “One of the key things that we talk about nowadays with our brands is that nice visuals and good product is one thing, but we’re really looking at sensibilities.” In essence: How were these put together, and why? Niceness, he says, “fits the bill really well,” because the designs are so layered. “Whether they’re referencing American workwear or a European dress shirt, the garments in-hand are a technical tour de force.”