Eric Haze Stitches a Nineties Friendship Into TOKYO Capsule

Signal. What happened: JOURNAL STANDARD relume, TOKYO No.1 SOUL SET and Eric Haze opened pre-orders for a five-item capsule marking the band’s booking at BAYCREW’S FESTIVAL OSAKA 2026. Exact object: a grey sweatshirt (¥10,450), a waffle-knit long sleeve in white or black (¥7,150), a rug (¥9,900) and a blanket (¥8,580), each supplied with a matching keyholder, plus the keyholder on its own (¥1,320), all tax included. When and where: online via BAYCREW’S STORE now, with domestic shipping from late October, and in person at Grand Green Osaka’s Umekita Park on October 24 and 25. Source: BAYCREW’S own festival pages and relume’s product listings, with pricing from a Japan market rel notice. Why it matters: it routes one of the designers who shaped hip-hop’s visual language through a long friendship with one of Tokyo’s most enduring hip-hop acts, and ties the result to a festival whose admission donations fund disaster recovery.

The friendship predates this capsule by some distance. The band’s own online shop already stocks an ERIC HAZE TAGGING Tee built around a tag Haze drew specifically for the group, placed across the front, back and sleeve in two versions at ¥5,500. The shop introduces him as a New York graffiti artist who has been close to Soul Set since the 1990s, the same history now used to frame the relume pieces. What changes this time is the treatment. The tag that appeared as a print on the band’s own shirt is stitched into the apparel here, and the collection reaches past clothing into a rug and a blanket.

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The apparel carries Haze’s tagging in embroidery rather than print, the hand style he refined on New York’s subway lines rendered in thread. The sweatshirt is listed in grey at ¥10,450, and the waffle long sleeve comes in white or black at ¥7,150, which makes it the entry point among the garments and puts it just under the ¥7,700 archive-photo tees from relume’s first Soul Set release in May. Both listings carry a “WEB/FES limited” label in their product titles, matching the way the release is being distributed: the online store and the festival grounds, with no wider shop rollout announced.

The homeware is where this capsule departs from relume’s earlier work with the band. The rug sells at ¥9,900 and the blanket at ¥8,580, and like the two garments each arrives with a keyholder whose design corresponds to its own graphic. The keyholder is also sold separately at ¥1,320, the lowest price in the set. For an open-air park festival in late October, the blanket is the one piece with an obvious use on the day itself.

Five separate product numbers cover the set. The listings published so far leave several practical details unstated, including sizing for the two garments, the rug’s dimensions and construction, and the blanket’s fabric. Quantities are limited, and online reservations close once each allocation sells through. Domestic shipping for online orders is scheduled to begin in late October, in step with the festival weekend.

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Haze was born in New York in 1961 and began writing graffiti in 1972 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, tagging SE3 before settling on the name that stuck. He came up through the Soul Artists crew and appeared in Style Wars, the 1983 documentary on the city’s subway writers.

The art education started before the trains. When Haze was about ten, his father arranged for the painter Elaine de Kooning to paint a portrait of him and his younger sister, and she gave him oil paints during the sittings. Abstraction soon gave way to bubble letters. By the early 1980s, as graffiti moved above ground, he was showing paintings and drawings alongside friends including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, before choosing graphic design over the gallery circuit.

He graduated in graphic design in 1985 and opened his own studio a year later, and that studio helped set how early hip-hop looked. Haze designed the logo for Tommy Boy Records, worked on identity and sleeve design for Public Enemy and made record covers for the Beastie Boys, part of a run of logos and covers for the genre’s defining names through the late 1980s.

 

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In the early 1990s Haze moved his studio to Los Angeles and launched his own clothing label, HAZE. He is credited as the first graffiti artist to brand his tag as a logo, which turned his signature into one of the earliest streetwear marks to come out of the hip-hop era. That history explains the format of the relume capsule. The tag is the design, and there is no separate illustration standing between the writer and the garment.

He now works from a studio in Brooklyn and has returned to painting and drawing, with solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo.

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Tokyo has been part of Haze’s working life for decades. By 2005 his HAZE label was running three stores in the city, and his long relationship with G-SHOCK has produced collaborative watches as well as the logos for the brand’s 25th, 30th, 35th and 40th anniversaries.

The fine art side has followed him there. His Tokyo solo exhibition Inside Out was the subject of a three-way conversation published by Tokion on New Year’s Day 2023, in which he described the title as a meeting of two sides of his work and spoke about his habit of building designs in black and white so they never depend on color.

This year he moved further from the street. In February, a four-day exhibition with TRADMAN’S BONSAI at TRADMAN’S TOKYO in Marunouchi showed his first ceramic pots made for bonsai, set beside trees the Tokyo bonsai studio shaped around icons the two sides share. Apparel made for that show included shirts, easy pants, a hooded sweatshirt and a long-sleeve tee, priced from ¥11,000 to ¥19,800, with the ceramic pot itself at ¥22,000. The relume capsule arrives eight months later, sitting below that range and sold to a festival crowd rather than through a Marunouchi showroom.

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TOKYO No.1 SOUL SET formed in 1990 out of Tokyo’s club scene and made their major-label debut in 1994 with the single “Romantic Densetsu”. The current lineup is BIKKE on vocals and lyrics, Toshimi Watanabe on vocals and guitar, and Hiroshi Kawanabe on DJ duty and tracks. The band’s own account of its sound is a layering act: Kawanabe’s hybrid productions carry Watanabe’s melodic singing and guitar, with BIKKE’s spoken, lyrical rap building a distinctly literary Japanese voice over the top.

The group paused in 2000 and returned in earnest in 2005 with the album OUTSET. They have released eight original albums, and in 2021 marked thirty years together with SOUND aLIVE, a set of their best-known songs remade. New singles followed: “Kaze no VISTA” in 2023, “Sayonara ga Sakihajimeta kara” in 2024, and “Hana wo Matsu” in December 2024. The band says it is now working on its first completely new album in more than a decade.

The members keep parallel careers. Kawanabe remains one of Japan’s best-known club DJs, Watanabe runs his own apparel label alongside solo work, and BIKKE plays in a second band. Their Sunday set in Osaka arrives with that new album still in progress, and with a year of relume releases already behind them.

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The Haze pieces are the third release JOURNAL STANDARD relume has made with the band this year. The first, in May, put archive photographs of the band on relaxed-fit cotton T-shirts at ¥7,700: one a live shot, one a shh session scene with a guitar, each in a faded charcoal or in white, with the band’s logo on the back and a collision mark at the back neck.

The second followed in early August with T-shirts and caps built on the artwork of 9 9/9, Jr. and Triple Barrel, three albums from the band’s early run, priced at ¥7,000 and ¥5,800 before tax. BAYCREW’S paired that drop with an interview feature in which Kawanabe and BIKKE talked about the Tokyo they came up in.

relume pitches itself on easy, unforced clothing for grown-ups, a “just right” register rather than anything that strains for attention, and the Soul Set pieces have stayed inside it. The Haze capsule shifts the mood more than the method: the same casual categories, now extended into sweatshirts and homeware, with an outside artist’s hand replacing archival photographs and album art.

The relationship between BAYCREW’S and the band also runs wider than relume. In late 2021 EDIFICE, another of the group’s labels, released a run of Soul Set sweatshirts tied to the band’s thirtieth anniversary, including one printed with the SOUND aLIVE jacket art. In the accompanying interview, Watanabe recalled designing a Soul Set shirt himself in the band’s early days and said the new pieces felt like that story reconnecting twenty years later.

 

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BAYCREW’S, the Shibuya-based group behind relume, EDIFICE and a long roster of other labels, launched its festival in 2019 as a tour of four Japanese cities. It moved to Yokohama in 2022 and has been in Osaka since 2024, returning this year to Grand Green Osaka, the urban park development connected directly to JR Osaka Station. Gates open at 11:00 on both days, with the program running from noon to 8:00 pm and last entry at 7:30.

The weekend is structured as a charity event. Entry requires a BAYCREW’S STORE membership and an advance donation that functions as the ticket, and the organizers direct those donations to recovery from the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake and the Oku-Noto torrential rains, and from the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake. Outside the park gates, a street market needs no admission, and its BAYCREW’S BAZAAR stall sells irregular stock from 550 to 4,400 yen with all proceeds donated to the same causes.

Eight live acts are split across the two days, with DJ sets around them. The lineup runs Chara, Ulfuls, NakamuraEmi, Donguriz and Ayumu Imazu on Saturday, then Kroi, Kimyo Reitaro BAND and Soul Set on Sunday. The festival’s look, from the key visual to the graphics placed around the grounds, comes from YAR, the Tokyo design studio led by the artist YOSHIROTTEN, and the program also includes an open-air fashion show.

Inside the park, the market gathers booths from across the BAYCREW’S labels. JOURNAL STANDARD’s YA・OYA? stand is the third collaboration with the contemporary artist Ken Kagami, built on the idea of the label reimagined as a neighborhood greengrocer, and purchases of ¥3,000 or more come with an improvised one-line sticker written by Kagami. Other stands run from flea-market vintage to a denim customization workshop. BAYCREW’S has not specified which booth will carry the Haze capsule on site.

Soul Set’s set is scheduled for noon on Sunday, October 25. Online orders for the capsule begin shipping within Japan in late October.