Freedom to Move with Uniqlo

A few days ago, we were invited to a special media gathering held by none other than Uniqlo, aka everyone’s favorite Japanese retailer of comfort wear. I’m sure plenty of you are already familiar with Uniqlo’s impressive catalog of comfortable everyday basics, so off I headed to Lotte Shopping Avenue, morning coffee in hand. I knew beforehand how Pablohoney is a great advocate of their Ultra Stretch Jeans, so what a pleasure it was to learn that it was actually a twofold event, the first of which involved said jeans.

Uniqlo had set up a photo booth for a mini event called the USJ Fit Model, where participants could try on a pair of Ultra Stretch Jeans and recreate a previously prepared pose. Most of the poses were purposely styled to emphasize the jeans’ ability to follow the motion of the user’s body comfortable. At the end of the photography session, participants walked away with a printout of their best pose and a shot at winning vouchers or a pair of Ultra Stretch Jeans through a lucky draw! I was far too bashful to be doing any modeling that day, and I totally regret it because two out of the five journalists who tried their hand at the modeling and lucky draw walked away with free Ultra Stretch Jeans! Sigh. It may not have been my lucky day, but you should go ahead and try your luck being a USJ Fit Model at Lotte Shopping Avenue, ongoing from today until October 6.

We also were given a special tour of the two-storey store by Yasuhiro Hayashi, the Chief Operating Officer of Uniqlo Indonesia. Yasuhiro was passionate about his product, and humorous to boot: he started the tour by giving welcoming notes in Indonesian, but defected to Japanese when he admitted there was no more room in his brain for other languages.  He gave us a brief lecture on seven out of Uniqlo’s twelve winning lines, and here are a few select ones that stood out most to me:

• Heattech: this is a groundbreaking material that keeps users warm in cold weather by transforming sweat into warmth. This innovative heat-trapping technology is what really made Uniqlo big-time players in the fashion retail industry. The fibers that make up the Heattech material are thinner, lighter, and more adept at keeping the user warm without compromising comfort. This means that shirts are thinner than other cold-weather shirts, giving the user more room to play around with the fashion aspect of it.
• Ultra Light Down: another innovative product to combat cold weather, Ultra Light Down parkas are made of fibers that keep the user warm and snug without the weight of conventional down. They are so flexible that they can even be folded down to fit a small bag the size of a folding umbrella, and are actually lighter than a Samsung Galaxy S4.
  
• Ultra Stretch Jeans: of course I can’t compile a list of favorite Uniqlo items without mentioning their legendary Ultra Strech Jeans. These jeans claim to make the user’s legs appear longer by tightening up areas that could use a little tightening up; they also say that because of the way they’re designed, users end up wearing a pair that are one to two sizes smaller than their usual number. And of course because they have the word “stretch” in them, they’re bound to be comfortable to wear, not restraining the user’s movements the way other jeans might.