UNIQLO and KAWS Build an Entire Universe Around COMPANION

Three new characters modeled on the Earth, the Moon and the sun join KAWS’ longtime COMPANION figure in a global UT rel land September 14.

UNIQLO is opening its next KAWS collection worldwide on September 14, with the U.S. leg of the launch pegged to 8:15 a.m. Eastern online and standard opening hours in stores. The new UT collection, titled KAWS Universe, does something the partnership hasn’t done before: it introduces characters KAWS built specific for UNIQLO rather than work an existential property. Two of those characters, a small sun and a small moon, and a third built around the shape of the Earth, now share panel space with COMPANION, the gloved, X-eyed figure that has anchored nearly every KAWS collaboration since the artist began making toys in the late 1990s.

The idea behind the new cast is closer to a mission statement than a merchandising hook. On UNIQLO’s own campaign page for the collection, KAWS describes the three additions as “three things we all live under and share, celebrate what brings us together.” The artwork jure that out literally: one Tee shows COMPANION carrying the Earth on its back, another has the figure resting against the moon, and a third has it pushing the sun along like a beach ball. A fourth adult tee strips the hue out entirely, render all three new characters together in black and white.

That frame matters partly because of what UNIQLO and KAWS haven’t done before. Every prior chapter of the partnership paired COMPANION with an existing property, either that meant Peanuts, Sesame Street or the Warhol estate, so the figure always arrived doing a kind of guest spot in someone else’s world. Earth, Moon and Sun exist only inside this collaboration, drawn for UNIQLO and nowhere else, which makes Universe less a crossover than an expansion of KAWS’ own cast of characters. UNIQLO has framed the move as an extension of its long-running Art For All know, the same lang the company uses to describe sponsor museum exhibit and build an entire creative role around a single artist.

A lookbook grid show KAWS collision, feature white, black, and gray tee and sweatshirt with various KAWS graph, two large Companion figures, and three plush keychain of the sun, moon, and earth.

Rel timing gets slight more complicated once the collection crosses borders. UNIQLO’s own Canadian storefront lists the online drop for 9:15 a.m. Eastern, a full hour behind the U.S. time reported ahead of launch, and neither figure appears to be a typo carried over from the other market. It’s a minor discrepancy, but a real one, and one more reminder that UNIQLO treats each of its markets as its own release calendar rather than sync a single global clock. Singapore and Hong Kong are both confirmed for the same September 14 date, with stores there open the collection at normal business hours rather than a staggered online drop.

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The collection breaks into three tiers: adult, kids, and, for the first time in the partnership’s history, a set of accessories. Adults get four Tee designs and three sweatshirt designs, all running from XS to 4XL, with the 100cm through 160cm kids’ sizing mirroring most of the same artwork at a smaller scale. A handful of sizes, including 100cm, XS, XXL, 3XL and 4XL, are sold online only, a sizing-tier restriction UNIQLO has used on past UT drops to keep flagship floor space manageable.

In Japan, where the collection is arriving through UNIQLO’s UT line, tees are priced at ¥1,990 each and sweatshirts at ¥3,990, with a kids’ tee running ¥990 and a kids’ sweatshirt ¥1,990, according to WWDJAPAN. In the U.S., adult tees are listed at $29.90 and sweatshirts at $49.90, with kids’ tees at $19.90 and kids’ sweatshirts at $29.90, per pre-launch sneaker and streetwear release trackers. Singapore pricing runs lower in local currency terms, with adult tees starting around S$19.90 and sweatshirts around S$39.90, reflecting UNIQLO’s usual practice of pricing each market independently rather than converting a single global figure.

Construction is where the collection tries to earn its price bump over a standard UT tee. KAWS’ signature “XX” eye motif, normally just printed, gets a suede-flock treatment on the Tee and a raised embroidery treatment on the sweatshirts, according to WWDJAPAN’s rundown of the line. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that tends to separate a KAWS UNIQLO rel collectors treat as disposable from one they keep folded in a drawer.

The accessories tier is the real first for this specific partner: three plush charms, one built around each new character, marking the first time UNIQLO and KAWS have put out a charm or keychain-style accessory together across nine years of collide. UNIQLO’s own product listings confirm three distinct charm SKUs rather than a single design in multiple colorways.

The KAWS Universe drop also lands inside a UT collection machine that moves far more often than the artist’s own releases might suggest. Under creative director Kosuke Kawamura, who took over the line in 2022 under the banner “Wear Your World,” UT has cycled through partnerships spanning manga and anime franchises, a Shueisha 100th-anniversary tie-in, a museum collab built around the Louvre’s collection, and a rotating slate of design partner recruit through the brand’s annual UT Grand Prix competition. Against that pace, KAWS occupies an unusual position inside UNIQLO’s roster: one of the only names the brand has kept on a near-yearly cycle since 2016, and the only one handed a standing, company-wide title rather than a single-season licensing deal.

A large pile of KAWS plush toys featuring both the brown Companion and blue Cookie Monster figures, all with signature X-shaped eyes, set against a plain white background.

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UNIQLO and KAWS have been doing this since 2016, when the first UT KAWS collection landed as a straightforward showcase of COMPANION on a Tee. What followed was a run of yearly or near-yearly collections built around a rotating cast of partners: KAWS x PEANUTS in 2017, KAWS x Sesame Street in 2018, KAWS: SUMMER in 2019, KAWS Tokyo First in 2021, and a 2023 UT rel time to a new KAWS art book. In 2024, the partnership grew a second dimension when UNIQLO signed on as presenting sponsor of KAWS + Warhol, an exhibition organized by the Andy Warhol Museum that opened in Pittsburgh that May and has since been touring internationally, with a Tokyo stop planned for 2026. A companion clothing collection, also called KAWS + Warhol, shipped alongside the museum opening.

The 2023 art-book release, for its part, came with one of the partnership’s largest physical gestures to date: oversized COMPANION and BFF sculpture install at UNIQLO flagship stores in Ginza, New York, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan, turning storefronts into temporary public art stops for the length of the promotion. Nothing on that scale has been confirmed for KAWS Universe as of this writing, though UNIQLO’s track record of pairing KAWS releases with in-store spectacle makes it a reasonable expectation rather than a stretch.

Japanese fashion press counted last November’s KAWS Winter knitwear collection, the first release built under KAWS’ new Artist in Residence title, as the eighth collaboration in that run, which would put KAWS Universe at number nine. UNIQLO’s own materials don’t state the count explicitly, describing the relationship only as dating to 2016, so the tally is closer to a fan’s scorecard than an official figure, one Driftzine is passing along with that caveat attached.

The Artist in Residence appointment itself, announced at the Museum of Modern Art during New York Fashion Week in September 2025, was a formal expansion of a relationship that had until then run through individual product drops. In the role, KAWS helps introduce new collaborators to UNIQLO, proposes creative concepts, takes part in the brand’s UT Grand Prix design competition, and appears at events alongside UNIQLO’s global brand ambassadors, in addition to continuing to design his own collections. John C. Jay, president of global creative at Fast Retailing, framed the appointment at the time as a match between KAWS’ history of breaking down boundaries in the art world and UNIQLO’s own attempt to redefine mass-market apparel through its LifeWear know.

 

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Brian Donnelly, who has worked under the name KAWS since he was a teenager tag a building roof in Jersey City so he could see it from his high school classroom, was born in 1974 and study illustration at New York’s School of Visual Arts, grad in 1996. He spent his early professional years animating backgrounds for shows including 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug, working days in animation and nights as a graffiti writer who eventually moved from painting trains and walls to something stranger: pry open bus shelter and phone booth ad displays across New York, Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo, draw the ad inside with his own characters, and sealing the case back up so commuters would find it altered.

COMPANION, the skeletal, gloved, X-eyed figure now central to nearly everything KAWS makes, started as a vinyl toy in 1999 through a collaboration with the Japanese label Bounty Hunter, part of a wave of designer toy work that also included Medicom Toy and, later, KAWS and Medicom’s own Tokyo storefront, Original Fake. From there his practice expanded into acrylic paintings, monumental public sculpture, and a long list of brand collaborations that includes Dior, Nike‘s Air Jordan 4, and Comme des Garçons, alongside the UNIQLO partnership. He lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Skarstedt Gallery in New York.

The name itself carries no built-in meaning, by the artist’s own account. He settled on it as a teenager simply because he liked how the four letters, K, A, W, S, looked together as a tag, long before it became a signature stamped on gallery walls and shoebox tissue paper alike. What started as spray paint has since scaled up literal into sculptures as tall as ten meters, built from material ranging from fiberglass and bronze to a steel pontoon inflatable raft, install in public plazas and museum atriums across multiple continents. His work is collected privately by figures including Pharrell Williams, Kid Cudi, Swizz Beatz and members of the South Korean group BTS.

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That Japanese connection runs deeper than the UNIQLO deal alone. Beyond the original Bounty Hunter toy, KAWS has worked with Nigo on A Bathing Ape and with Jun Takahashi on Undercover, and for nearly seven years he ran Original Fake out of Aoyama with Medicom Toy before the two sides close it in 2013. UNIQLO, whose parent company Fast Retailing is headquartered in Yamaguchi, isn’t an outlier partner so much as the latest chapter in a relationship with Japanese fashion and toy culture that predates the UT deal by close to two decades.

What makes COMPANION durable as a piece of commercial design, on a museum wall or a Tee alike, is the same quality that makes it a slightly odd fit for a slogan as sunny as “we are better together.” The figure’s crossed-out eyes and slumped, embrace poses have always carried a current of melancholy under the cartoon surface, friendship and loneliness rendered in the same flat colors. Building Earth, Moon and Sun as literal, cosmic-scale companion for it doesn’t erase that undertone so much as give it somewhere new to stand.