CONTRIBUTED BY KELLY
It’s summer. You want some new clothes. Some hip clothes. The kind of clothes that you can’t find at the PX and you don’t feel like ordering on the internet ‘cause you want to touch them, try them on, feel somewhat fashionable again. Your needs are simple. You want to be inside a store and you want to shop.
Unfortunately, I can’t recommend some hidden gem of a shopping mall that you crave. What I can recommend is a new boutique located on a narrow little seawall sidestreet in Chatan. It’s name? “Colors House” (this is the google translated version of the page). The staff is friendly. The clothes, groovy. And most of the designers are local Okinawans.
Want to see where their creations are dreamed up? Just peep around the corner of the shop floor and you can see the studio for yourself. When I went, one of the designers, “Yo”, actually let me step inside her atelier and try on one of her newest creations! (Green gaucho length pants with bingata design trim) Wow! They even fit!
Unfortunately, I couldn’t purchase the pants. They were so hot off the sewing machine (Yo was still trimming stray threads when she handed them to me) that they didn’t even have a price yet. Instead, I bought a funky little hand-painted change purse for about 700 yen from a Thai designer the store features, JiJi.
Ahhh! Purchase made. Craving satisfied…new young designers supported…relief!
To get there:
Going north from Foster on 58, turn left at the Pizza In plaza. Then turn left again at the nail studio. You’ll see a colorful mural for a tattoo shop down the road (on the left). Colors House is just after that.