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A collide already six years deep trades its usual leather anchor for zip hoodies and tracksuits when Palace’s Autumn 26 season reaches Tokyo on September 19.
Palace Skateboards‘s three Japanese stores open at 11 a.m. on September 19, alongside the brand’s domestic web shop and its corner inside Dover Street Market Ginza, for the seventh weekly chapter of the label’s Autumn 26 season. The week before carried no outside name in its own title at all, just another rotation of house basics. Week 7 does carry a name: it brings back Avirex, the American flight jacket maker that opened this same season back in August with a single, heavyweight leather jacket. Six weeks and one quiet week later, the partnership returns in a completely different register, and in a lot more pieces than one.
Palace Shop Tokyo
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Palace’s own listicle for the Autumn 2026 range spells out exact what is arriving under the Avirex name this week: a Palace Avirex Jacket, a Palace Avirex Track Jogger paired with a Palace Avirex Track Top to form a full tracksuit, a Palace Avirex Zip Hood, a Palace Avirex Longsleeve and Palace Avirex Tee, and a Palace Avirex P-Frame 5 Panel cap alongside a Palace Avirex Nein Cuff Beanie. A Japan market rel notice covering the drop describes the same lineup in broader terms: jackets, tracksuits, zip hoodies, Tee, beanies and caps, tied together by an oversized logo treatment that runs across the pieces rather than sitting shh in one corner the way a single embroidered patch might. Domestic pricing for the indie items had not surfaced as of this writing, and neither brand’s press materials had specified whether the jacket in this week’s lineup is a lighter companion piece to August’s leather anchor or something closer to a standard team jacket.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Palace’s Avirex merge have historic lived or died on the leather piece; the sportswear built around it usually reads as support rather than the main event. Putting the tracksuit, hoodie and cap on their own release six weeks after the jacket, rather than bundling everything into one drop, gives the sportswear side room to stand on its own rather than getting lost next to a much more expensive coat.
The release lands across Palace’s usual Japanese footprint: the Tokyo shop in Jingumae, the Osaka and Fukuoka locations, the brand’s own Japanese online store, and the dedicated Palace space at Dover Street Market Ginza. All five typically go live at the same 11 a.m. mark, and stock at the physical locations tends to move fastest on collective weeks rather than house-basics weeks like the one that preceded this drop.
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Avirex’s role in Autumn 26 did not start this week. The season itself launch global on August 7, with Japan, Korea, China and Australia follow a day later on August 8, and the marquee outerwear piece across every territory was a single Avirex leather jacket. Coverage of the August lookbook describe a heavyweight leather body finished with a winged eagle skull emblem across the back and co-branded gothic type running beneath it, a much heavier and more graphic statement than the GORE-TEX shells, workwear-inspired jackets and varsity pieces surround it in the same collection. Where those other categories leaned on technical fabric or collegiate lettering to feel current, the Avirex jacket leaned the opposite direction, toward the oversized graphics and visual excess associated with the label’s late-1990s and early-2000s streetwear peak.
Resale listings for Palace’s past Avirex leather jackets give some sense of where that kind of piece typically lands on price. A grey style from Fall 2023 carried an original retail figure around 1,570 US dollars on the secondary market, while a Fall 2025 version made in partnership with the Doraemon license was tagged closer to 2,012 US dollars at retail and has traded well above that since. Neither number confirms what the new Fall 2026 jacket cost when it went on sale in August, but both suggest the category Palace and Avirex are working in: a genuine leather jacket priced closer to a designer outerwear piece than a standard collaboration hoodie.
That jacket has already been on sale in Japan since August 8, more than six weeks before this week’s release. What Week 7 adds is everything that would normally sit underneath it: the tracksuit, hoodie and layering pieces that let the connection extend into daily rotation rather than living entirely inside a single, expensive showpiece coat.
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Palace and Avirex have worked together on and off since at least 2020, and the pattern has repeated with enough regularity that it now functions as one of the London label’s steadier seasonal fixtures, closer in spirit to Palace’s long-running Gore-Tex or adidas relationships than to a one-season novelty. Palace’s Fall 2020 collection included a white Avirex leather jacket splashed with a large viper graphic across the back, rel alongside a teddy fleece jacket and velour tracksuit set that season. The 2021 holiday collection paired the two brands again through a reissued Avirex A2 jacket decorated by the UK artist Zomby, itself a nod to the A2’s own history as a jacket standardized by the US Army in the early 1930s. By Winter 2024, the collaboration had shifted toward leather-trimmed, wool-bodied jackets carrying bold lettering across the back, a construction closer in spirit to this year’s eagle skull piece than to the earlier, more illustrative viper and Zomby graphics. A Fall 2025 edition, produced with a Doraemon license layered on top of the Avirex base, carried that retail price above 2,000 US dollars noted earlier and has become one of the more sought-after versions of the collaboration on the resale market since.
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Viewed against that run, this year’s Avirex chapter is unusual mainly for how it has been structured: one heavyweight jacket in the season’s opening week, followed by a full sportswear range six weeks later, rather than the jacket and its supporting pieces landing together in a single drop the way most past Avirex seasons have worked.
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Avirex was founded in New York in 1975 by Jeff Clyman, a lawyer and the son of an Army Air Corps pilot, who started the company after his own habit of wearing his father’s original World War II flight jacket to air shows led so many people to ask about it that he began reselling vintage aviation jackets from his personal collection. That collection sold out. To keep meeting demand, Clyman moved into making reproductions himself, and the name Avirex followed from there, a combination of the Latin “avis,” for bird, and “rex,” for king. What began as reproductions of period MA-1, A-2 and B-3 flight jacket styles eventually grew into an official reissue contract: the company produced a reissued A-2 jacket for the United States Air Force in 1987. Some of Avirex’s own retail copy describes an even earlier supply relationship with the US military dating back to the war itself, a claim Wikipedia’s entry on the brand disputes outright for the World War II period specifically; the 1987 reissue work is the part of that history with the clearest paper trail, and it is the version of the story used here.
The bigger cultural turn came in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Avirex’s oversized leather jackets, heavy with patches, embroidered insignia and bold color, became a fixture of East Coast hip hop, worn by figures including the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and Method Man, and later carried into the 2000s by artists like 50 Cent. That association is largely what made the brand a recurring reference point for streetwear labels like Palace decades later, rather than the aviation history alone. Clyman sold the Avirex brand and trademark in 2006. In Japan specifically, the brand has operated under TSI Holdings since the conglomerate acquired an apparel importer holding the Avirex and Schott distribution rights in a 2016 deal reported at roughly 15 billion yen for a 79 percent stake. TSI’s Avirex has also run its own long-running, Japan-only partnership with New Japan Pro Wrestling, directing wrestlers’ ring jackets and releasing co-branded MA-1s across a relationship WWD Japan describes as more than two decades old, entirely separate from anything Palace has done with the brand. Avirex marked its fiftieth year in business in 2025.
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Palace Skateboards was founded in London in 2009 by Lev Tanju and Gareth Skewis, who met through the city’s skate scene centered on the Southbank Centre’s undercroft; Skewis had previously co-owned the respected independent retailer Slam City Skates, a background in retail that reportedly shaped how the label eventually approached its own distribution. The brand’s name reportedly came from the nickname Tanju and his friends used for their own run-down shared flat, worn ironically given the building’s actual condition. Its Tri-Ferg logo, a Penrose triangle with “Palace” repeated across each face to suggest continuous motion, was designed by Fergus Purcell, at the time Marc Jacobs’ design director. (One Wikipedia account of the brand’s founding lists a third co-founder, Marshall Taylor, alongside Tanju and Skewis, though that detail does not appear in most other reporting on Palace’s history and is not repeated here as settled fact.)
What started as hand-printed T-shirts sending up the logos of luxury fashion houses grew into a label that now rel new products most Friday mornings across five seasonal periods, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and an additional Ultimo season, backed by an early skate team that included Lucien Clarke, Olly Todd and Charlie Young and a lo-fi, VHS-shot video style that became part of the brand’s visual identity in its own right. Palace now runs flagship stores beyond London in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. Avirex sits alongside a much longer collision list that has grown over the years to include Adidas, Reebok, Nike, Gucci, Polo Ralph Lauren and Salomon, among others, spanning everything from football kits to technical outerwear. Few of those partnerships, though, have repeated across as many separate seasons as the one built on Avirex leather, which is now into at least its sixth documented year.
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Avirex is far from the only name attached to Palace’s Autumn 26 season, even if it is the only one getting a second chapter this week. The same August range also introduced camouflage GORE-TEX shells finished with contrasting blue trim and yellow zippers, workwear jackets built around a fictional “Palace Transport Co.” identity that riffs on a well-known Japanese delivery company’s branding, and a run of religious-imagery graphics alongside collegiate varsity pieces done in Old English lettering. Against that backdrop, the sportswear arriving under the Avirex name this week reads less like a novelty insert and more like Palace working through one relationship at a time inside a season built from several of them at once, giving each partner its own moment rather than compressing everything into a single opening drop.
Whether Avirex resurfaces again before Autumn 26 closes out is not yet known. What is clear from the season so far is that the collaboration no longer needs a single jacket to carry it. Week 7 is the version of Palace and Avirex built for day rotation, tracksuits and zip hoodies rather than a leather showpiece, and it is the first time this season the pairing has shown up twice.
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