The Cult of Bode Arrives in Tokyo

On a modest street in Tokyo’s Yoyogi-Uehara neighborhood, occupying the ground floor of a residential building, sits the first Asia outpost of New York label Bode. It’s an unassuming address — rather than planting itself in Tokyo’s animated fashion corridors like Ginza or Aoyama, the store slips into a hushed pocket where people live, work, run errands, and walk home with groceries. Bode isn’t announcing itself. It’s embedding.

 

It was always going to be Japan. Nearly a decade ago, when Bode was still a young brand navigating the wholesale world, some of its earliest and most ardent champions were Japanese buyers. The dots had been quietly connecting for years. So when founder and creative director Emily Adams Bode Aulja began contemplating where the brand’s first retail location in Asia might land, Tokyo felt predestined.

Bode Tokyo’s interiors were designed by New York-based studio and longtime Bode collaborators, Green River Project LLC (GRPLLC). From a wall-to-wall wood-clad Chinatown apartment to Bode’s L.A. store — fitting somewhere between a hunting lodge and a private members’ club — Aaron Aujla and Benjamin Bloomstein of GRPLLC have a gift for creating textural spaces that feel generationally inherited rather than newly assembled. 

The mood inside reads diplomatic, playing out like a bit of cultural banter between Japanese and American textiles, objects, and historical references. Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s illustrious, stately White House restoration looms large as the blueprint. A painting that once hung in JFK’s Oval Office, recreated by artist Matt Kenny, sets the tone upon entry. An American black walnut table holds the room together, with a 1920s French ceramic vase by Edmond Lachenal perched on top. Iranian brass vases flank Kurt Beers’ painting of the Great Pyramid of Giza. And Japanese materials thread throughout it all — most strikingly in the dressing room doors’ electric green glass panes, sourced from Hiyama in Kanagawa Prefecture. Personal traces of Bode Aujla’s own home life are also woven into the space, from dried hydrangeas plucked from her Connecticut garden to a desk lamp transported directly from her home. And like so much of Bode’s signature visual language, wood grounds everything. 

For travel souvenir collectors, there are select pieces that only exist here: bras and pillows sewn from mid-century National Parks souvenir pillowcases, appliquéd tees, and keepsake garments made exclusively for the Bode Tokyo location. This is no doubt the label we’ll recognize, but not quite as we’ve seen it before.

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Located at 3-chōme-43-1 Uehara in Shibuya, Tokyo, Bode opened on February 20, 2026, and is now open daily from 11am-7pm. Discover more from Bode online and on Instagram.