Kei Ninomiya brings punk delicacy to DSM menswear and Vans slip-ons

Kei Ninomiya has found a slyer way to speak streetwear’s language. At Pitti Uomo in Florence on June 17, 2026, his first menswear showing for DSM Kei Ninomiya paired punk instinct with couture discipline, while an OTW by Vans Slip-On turned the brand’s most familiar checkerboard into something lighter, with plant and floral cues softening the shoe’s skate-born edge.

The DSM Kei Ninomiya line is a new in-house label for Dover Street Market, the retail platform conceived by Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe, whose original London outpost opened in Mayfair in September 2004. That history matters: DSM has never been just a store. It is a creative engine, which is exactly why a Kei Ninomiya line under its banner feels bigger than a seasonal drop. Introduced as a Spring/Summer 2026 project tied to Paris Fashion Week in 2025, DSM Kei Ninomiya sits apart from noir, Ninomiya’s main label, which launched in 2018 after he had spent more than half a decade as a COMME des GARÇONS pattern-maker.

Ninomiya described the project as community-driven, with each collection built around a different group. The first two efforts pull from collegiate and soccer worlds, but the runway debut leaned hardest into music, especially punk. The key was restraint. Rather than literal subcultural cosplay, the clothes were rendered in a tone-on-tone register, with a couture-like polish that kept the references sharp without becoming nostalgic. That balance is the point: the attitude is there, but the noise has been edited out.

The Vans piece follows the same logic. OTW by Vans is the brand’s collaborative line, its “center of excellence” for partnerships that push product and brand experience beyond the expected while staying rooted in skateboarding culture. The Slip-On’s checkerboard is one of Vans’ most recognizable signatures, so Ninomiya’s decision to thread in plant motifs is not a simple remix. It is a softening, a way of making a hard-coded icon feel more tactile and less blunt. Vans has spent years revisiting the checkerboard Slip-On in woven and other reworked forms, but Ninomiya’s version is more pointed: it proves that the most durable streetwear icons do not need to be louder to stay credible.