NUBIAN Marks 20 Years With a First-Ever Rick Owens Collaboration, Plus Needles and JULIUS

recall

• A Milestone Year, Announced in Three Parts
• From a 3-Tsubo Ueno Stall to Five Cities
• Rick Owens x NUBIAN: A First for Japan, By Design
• Needles x NUBIAN: The Track Suit, Reworked in Linen
• JULIUS x NUBIAN: GASMASK Gets a Denim Makeover
• Release Details, Pricing & Where to Shop
• NUBIAN FUKUOKA: The Store Behind the Drop

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Twenty years deep, NUBIAN is celebrating the only way a Tokyo select shop with this much accumulated goodwill really can: by calling in favors. The Harajuku-rooted retailer has used its corporate 20th anniversary to unlock a slate of exclusive collaborations with brands it has built long relationships with over two decades, and the first wave — under the banner “NUBIAN 20th EXCLUSIVE Vol.1” — pairs the shop with Rick Owens, Needles, and JULIUS for a three-way capsule that drops July 4.

The timing isn’t incidental. July 4 is also the grand-opening date for NUBIAN FUKUOKA, the brand’s fifth physical location and, by its own account, the largest store it has ever built. The Vol.1 capsule isn’t exclusive to the new shop, though — every piece goes on sale simultaneously across all five NUBIAN locations the moment doors open, plus online. It’s less a single-store activation than a coordinated, company-wide statement: this is what two decades of relationship-building in Japanese fashion retail buys you.

What makes Vol.1 worth paying attention to beyond the anniversary math is the Rick Owens piece specifically. NUBIAN has carried Rick Owens product for years and built a loyal customer base around it, but this marks the first time the brand has actually collided with Rick Owens on an exclusive — and by extension, the first Rick Owens collaboration tied to any Japanese retailer. That’s a meaningfully rare event for a label that guards its connective output carefully.

【NUBIAN FUKUOKA】
史上最大規模となるフラッグシップストア「NUBIAN FUKUOKA」を2026年7月4日(土)に福岡・大名エリアにオープンいたします。今回の福岡出店をもって、国内主要5都市への展開が実現。

福岡店のオープンおよび20周年を記念し、Rick Owens、ENFANTS RICHES… pic.twitter.com/qwbSRTafoI

— NUBIAN (@nubian_tokyo) June 18, 2026

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NUBIAN’s origin story is the kind that gets told and retold in Japanese fashion press for a reason: the shop opened in 2006 in Tokyo’s Ueno neighborhood, in a space reportedly around three tsubo — something in the neighborhood of ten square meters, smaller than a lot of walk-in closets. From there it built itself around hip-hop and music-culture sensibilities, developing a buying point of view distinctive enough to attract both luxury houses and emerging streetwear labels into the same racks.

Two decades later, that single cramped storefront has become a five-city operation spanning Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo, with Fukuoka now joining as the newest and largest addition. The anniversary, in other words, isn’t just a marketing hook — it’s a real inflection point for a company that has methodically expanded one flagship at a time, and the Vol.1 capsule is the first visible piece of how NUBIAN intends to mark it.

It’s also worth noting that Rick Owens, Needles, and JULIUS are only the opening act. NUBIAN’s broader 20th-anniversary and Fukuoka-opening rollout reportedly involves exclusive items from more than 30 brands in total, including names like AMIRI, ENFANTS RICHES DÉPRIMÉS, Martine Rose, MM6 Maison Margiela, and Matthew M. Williams. Vol.1 is the first of presumably several volumes still to surface — a detail that suggests this is a rollout worth tracking through the summer, not a single-day event.

 

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The Rick Owens piece is built around the ALICE JKT, a silhouette that’s already one of NUBIAN’s best-selling Rick Owens styles in its own right. For this exclusive, the jacket is rendered in a leather called “LCD,” which only entered the Rick Owens lineup with the brand’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection — meaning this collide is working with material that’s barely had time to exist anywhere else.

LCD stands for Delavé Calf, with “delavé” borrowed from the French for “washed out” or “faded.” The process pre-dyes the calfskin before subjecting it to a wash treatment, producing a mottled, uneven cast that sits somewhere between black and dust-grey rather than landing cleanly on either. The hide itself is thick and notably oil-rich; as the jacket gets worn in, that internal oil content is meant to migrate to the surface over time, deepening the color and texture with use. It’s leather designed explicitly to age into something singular — closer to a lifetime piece than a seasonal one.

The ALICE JKT arrives in a Washed Black colorway, priced at ¥873,400 and available in sizes 44 through 52. NUBIAN has been direct about scale here: production is described as extremely limited, framed as a rare project even by Rick Owens’ own standards, and positioned as the centerpiece of the entire 20th-anniversary capsule. Given that this is also the first Rick Owens collaboration to touch Japanese retail at all, demand at NUBIAN’s five stores on July 4 should be treated as a near-certainty for anyone hoping to actually secure one in person.

 

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Needles’ relationship with NUBIAN already runs deep — this isn’t a first encounter so much as the latest chapter in an ongoing collective  partnership, here recontextualized for the 20th-anniversary milestone. The Vol.1 capsule takes the brand’s signature track-jacket detailing and rebuilds it in a cotton-linen blend with a pronounced nep-yarn texture, swapping the usual technical sportswear materials for something with more visible, tactile character.

The lineup runs four pieces deep. On top, there’s an open-collar shirt carrying Needles’ signature track tape across the front, offered in both long-sleeve (¥35,200) and short-sleeve (¥33,000) versions, both in black and sized XS through XL. On the bottom half, the familiar H.D. Track Pant (¥39,600) is joined by a new H.D. Track Short BDU (¥35,200) — the first time this particular silhouette has been extended into shorts form, giving the collaboration a genuine warm-weather use case rather than just a fabric swap on existing pieces.

The black-based colorway keeps the focus on the track-line detailing itself, which stands out more distinctly against the textured cotton-linen ground than it would on a smoother technical fabric. It’s a subtle reworking rather than a dramatic reinvention, which tracks with how this partnership has typically operated — small, considered adjustments to an established shared vocabulary rather than a reinvention for its own sake.

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JULIUS’s contribution to Vol.1 is a single, dense statement piece rather than a multi-item range. It’s built on the brand’s GASMASK silhouette — one of designer Tatsuro Horikawa’s signature shapes — translated into a 12oz wax-coated denim that carries enough weight and surface presence to read as substantial without tipping into bulk. The coating gives the denim a distinct, slightly rough sheen that’s become something of a JULIUS signature in its own right, sitting somewhere between utilitarian and lightly industrial.

The piece itself is the 12oz Denim GASMASK Wide Trouser, priced at ¥132,000 in sizes 1 through 4. Despite the wide-leg silhouette, the trouser includes hem belts that let the wearer cinch and adjust the shape, preventing the cut from reading as one-size-fits-all volume. The more distinctive functional detail is a zip placed at the knee, which makes the trouser detachable into a baggy short — effectively giving the single SKU two genuinely different end states depending on the season or the styling intent.

It’s a piece that leans into everything JULIUS is generally known for — heavy darkwear sensibility, technical detailing, a slightly confrontational silhouette — while giving it a practical, two-way design hook that NUBIAN’s customer base, accustomed to layering and reworking pieces across seasons, should find genuinely useful rather than gimmicky.

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All three Vol.1 collide — Rick Owens, Needles, and JULIUS — release simultaneously on Saturday, July 4, 2026, from opening time, across every NUBIAN physical location plus the brand’s online store. There is no staggered rollout and no single-store exclusivity tied to the new Fukuoka flagship; this is a same-moment, same-access drop nationwide.

Rick Owens x NUBIAN

• ALICE JKT (Washed Black) — ¥873,400 — Sizes 44 / 46 / 48 / 50 / 52

Needles x NUBIAN

• TRACK L/S OPEN COLLAR SHIRT, Cotton Linen (Black) — ¥35,200 — Sizes XS–XL
• TRACK S/S OPEN COLLAR SHIRT, Cotton Linen (Black) — ¥33,000 — Sizes XS–XL
• H.D. TRACK PANT, Cotton Linen (Black) — ¥39,600 — Sizes XS–XL
• H.D. TRACK SHORT BDU, Cotton Linen (Black) — ¥35,200 — Sizes XS–XL

JULIUS x NUBIAN

• 12oz Denim GASMASK Wide Trouser (Black) — ¥132,000 — Sizes 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Given the production scale described for the Rick Owens piece in particular, in-store availability at smaller locations should not be assumed to mirror flagship stock levels; checking individual store social accounts on release morning is the more reliable approach for anyone shopping in person outside Tokyo or the new Fukuoka location.

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The new flagship anchoring this entire rollout opens at 1-12-46 Daimyo, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka City, in the Daimyo district of central Fukuoka, with standard operating hours of 11:00 to 20:00 starting July 4. It marks NUBIAN’s first physical presence in the Kyushu region and its fifth city overall, following the existing Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo locations.

NUBIAN has described Fukuoka as its largest-scale flagship to date, exceeding even the Harajuku and Osaka stores in footprint — a notable claim for a company whose entire retail identity traces back to a three-tsubo room in Ueno. The opening also comes with its own hiring push, with NUBIAN recruiting store management and sales staff specifically for the new location ahead of the July 4 launch, which gives some sense of the scale the company is planning to operate at in Kyushu from day one rather than easing in gradually.

Pairing that physical expansion with its most exclusive Rick Owens access to date, alongside continuations of its established Needles and JULIUS relationships, makes for a launch week with more riding on it than a typical seasonal collaboration drop. Whether Vol.2 of the 20th-anniversary series follows quickly or trickles out over the rest of 2026 remains to be seen, but for a brand built almost entirely on long-term relationships, this feels like the moment those relationships were always building toward. Anyone who has watched NUBIAN’s buying point of view evolve over two decades — from a single Ueno room to a five-city footprint — should find Vol.1 a fairly precise distillation of what got it here: deep brand loyalty, patient relationship-building, and an evident willingness to ask for the once-in-a-career favor when the milestone actually warrants it.