10 DECEMBER 18-24, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Dressing Denver RYUJU COLLECTIVE’S HANDMADE CLOTHING HAS BEEN WORN BY LOCAL MUSICIANS LIKE EGO N FRIENDS, RESRFACE AND DNA PICASSO. BY CLEO MIRZA While his friends were playing tag and riding bikes as kids, Joshua Ryuju was drawing in his mother’s art studio. “I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was twelve, because I chose to stay inside and just draw instead. Now, as an adult, I want to make this a career, so it’s a little different, but I’ve always enjoyed drawing and doodling and painting,” recalls Ryuju, founder of the Denver-based brand Ryuju Collective. Though he was raised in rural Kempton, Illinois (with a population under 200), he spent his summers visiting his mother’s family in Japan, where he was encouraged to explore his artistic inclinations and was introduced to Japanese fashion. Ryuju cred- its his lifelong love of art to his mom and maternal grandfather, who was a painter, sculptor and photographer, with a penchant for high-end Hasselblad cameras. They may not have known it then, but those moments with his mother and her family sowed the seeds of what is now Ryuju Collective, a project that combines Ryuju’s love of fashion, art and design. With Ryuju’s handmade bespoke clothing, styling ser- vices, custom graphic design and video production, Ryuju Collective is taking Denver by storm – with no signs of slow- ing down any time soon. While idly doomscrolling one day, he fell into a rabbit hole of high-end Japanese “slow fashion” brands like Kapitol and Visvim. “I feel like I’ve always loved clothes, but it’s not like my mom was buying me these nice brands growing up,” he says. “We were going to Kohl’s and TJ Maxx, so it was always like, look as fl y as I could with the budget we had.” With his keen eye for design and a thrifting background, it was only a matter of time be- fore Ryuju started creating his own pieces using vintage fi nds, which remains the core of his brand’s DNA today. Besides taking one screenprinting class in college, Ryuju hadn’t studied fashion de- sign, so he used the COVID downtime to teach himself the basics of sew- ing and construction. “I was hand-stitching everything with thin machine thread,” he says. “But something clicked in my head while I was doing it like, ‘Oh, I can do this shit.’” After college, he took a social media manager gig in the Quad Cities near the Illinois and Iowa border; he also started shooting vid- eos for musician friends. He lost the social media gig at the start of COVID and was sleeping on a friend’s couch when he discovered Cobra Kai. Curious about work- ing on the show, he found the casting agency in At- lanta, submitted his head- shots, and he got booked to do crew and background work on the set of Cobra Kai and a few other Netfl ix shows, which still doing freelance videography on the side. In 2022, he moved to Denver; he had fond mem- ories of visiting Colorado – just a “short” ten-hour drive from his hometown, he recalls – and decided to move to the Mile High City on a whim. While completing a speech therapy as- sistant program at University of Colorado Boulder, he honed his technical sewing skills working at a production studio and making costumes for the staff of Casa Bo- nita. He bought his fi rst sewing machine, too, and worked independently on his own art, dressing local artists and designing and making artist merch. He also kept doing video work. “I’ve al- ways worked with musicians, because I’ve had this camera for years,” he says. “I started out just doing recap videos for events and music videos.” Before moving here, he’d reconnected with Jordan Burgett, a musician he’d met in Iowa. Burgett and Ryuju collaborated on some visuals, and Ryuju started to build connections with various local musicians because of his frequent presence at shows. But his shift from fi lming musicians to dressing musi- cians really took off once he connected with indie pop artist ego n friends. Ryuju followed ego n friends after they met at a show he was fi lming, and ended up reaching out to offer the artist a better wardrobe. “I saw one of his music vid- eos, and I was just like, ‘His outfi t looks like shit,’” Ryuju says with a laugh. “So I was like, ‘Yo, I make clothes, too, and I really think my style would fi t your music, shoot me a DM if you’re interested.’ Later that day, he came over, and I gave him some outfi ts, and he shot a lot of his visuals for are u alone? in those.” That one message led to an ongoing collaboration between Ryuju Collective, ego n friends and Friendly Collective, a recording studio co-owned by ego n friends and Christian Hundley. It also introduced him to several other musi- cians that he’s since dressed for the stage, including ReS- rface, Malcolm Whyz3 and DNA Picasso. But as a one-man op- eration, Ryuju Collective simply can’t churn out con- stant new looks to style a full roster of clients, and outfi t repeating is out of the question with Ryuju’s bold statement pieces. “People hit me up asking me to style them, but in the frequency that I make things, I’m not just pumping shit out. And some people have already worn my stuff, so I can’t just be like, ‘Oh yeah, you can wear this,’ when ego wore it at his show a week ago,” he acknowledges. “So I usually turn people down, unless they want to com- mission something.” Ryuju has carved out a niche for himself with eye-catching signature design elements like oversized silhouettes, reclaimed denim, textured felt appliques, patchworking and intentional distressing. Every Ryuju Collec- tive garment features handmade touches, like hand stitching, distressing or dyeing. His designs blend his affi nity for American vintage with Japanese fashion infl uences, all with sustainability in mind. “When you go to Japan, everyone is so fashion-forward. They’re like ten years ahead of the U.S. So I feel like that’s al- ways been inspirational,” says Ryuju. The techniques and fabrics he uses are heavily inspired by Japanese sewing and stitching traditions, especially his indigo-dyed denim (he keeps a vat of dye in his backyard), and decorative patchworking, while the Japa- nese brands he coveted online continue to inspire his forward-thinking point of view. Given how much waste the fashion in- dustry notoriously produces, Ryuju is com- mitted to making his brand as sustainable as possible. He starts with reclaimed vintage materials, typically seeking out heavy-duty workwear from long-established brands like Levi’s and Carhartt. “I don’t use any- thing that’s new. I can make a pair of jeans from scratch, but I choose not to because CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Joshua Ryuju calls his bold designs “Conversation starters.” Ryuju poses with his models during Denver Fashion Week’s Winter 2024 Sustainability show. ARAM AGHABABIAN RYUJU COLLECTIVE
