Mayumi Y. for Drake’s

Mayumi Yamase's studio is tucked away in the residential streets around the back of Shinjuku. It's tranquil here despite being just a stone's throw away from the energetic chaos of one of the busiest train stations in the world. Tokyo is full of those kinds of contradictions, clashes between sound and fury and peace and quiet, ancient craft and hypermodern technology, past and future.

It's a city that constantly offers an artist "new perspectives", as Mayumi puts it. She began painting seriously in high school, but she grew up in a creative household — both her mother and sister are also artists — and she went on to study art formally first in Tokyo before heading to London and Chelsea College of Art. She has kept working ever since, returning to Japan and building a body of work based on her bold, colourful, looping abstract shapes.

She traces part of her brushwork's particular quality back to the Japanese calligraphy which she studied as a child. "I think it comes from learning to quiet my thoughts and fully immerse myself in the moment of creating," she says and there's something of that discipline in her paintings and their mark making.

Mayumi finds her inspirations everywhere: in nature, in books, in the colours and compositions of everyday life. Her studio reflects this. When we visit, it's full of canvases placed against the walls, soft and undulating sculptures, work at various stages of completion.

We first connected with Mayumi a couple of years ago via a friend of a friend in Tokyo, a meeting that slowly developed into a collaboration, with Mayumi applying her signature styles to some of our pieces. The process involved looking carefully at where Drake's world and hers might overlap. This made its way through some of our classics, from silk scarves to camp collar shirting, all ready for the warmer months and Tokyo’s famously humid summers, and great canvases for Mayumi’s aesthetic world.

The Ringer T-shirt is cut from a soft cotton jersey with red ribbing at the neck and cuffs, while the Rugby top and sweater come in bold red and white stripes, with embroidery of Mayumi’s patterns. Both bold enough to do the talking, easy enough to wear anywhere, the kind of thing you reach for without thinking whether you’re in London or Tokyo or anywhere else