About REAL SIMONS

REAL SIMONS is a Shanghai-born leather-wear brand. We recut 1930s–50s vintage patterns for the modern build. Sizes are given for the Japanese market.

Good leather should not be a luxury reserved for the few.

That is what twenty years have taught us.

"If the leather jacket I want doesn't exist, I'll make it myself"

Xi Jie, who founded the brand, started out simply as an enthusiast.

Twenty years ago, drawn in by vintage culture and motorcycles, he began selling clothing. The magazine he read most closely in those days was Lightning. Copies were hard to come by in Shanghai, so every issue he managed to find was kept like a treasure and read the way you read a dictionary.

Ten years into selling, one frustration kept building.

The clothes he wanted to wear never fit quite right.

Patterns from a hundred years ago were cut for the bodies of that era. People today are built more solidly. Wearing a slim, tight reproduction exactly as it was made was never what you would call comfortable.

If it doesn't exist, make it. That is where REAL SIMONS began.

"be real" — the true Simon

The founder's given name is Shuai Hongyun. His English name is Simon, written in Chinese characters as 西門, which sounds much the same.

Because of his long silver hair, people often mistook him for a woman from behind. Customers began teasing him as "Big Sister Ximen," and the nickname Xi Jie stuck. Among enthusiasts he is still called that today.

The true Simon — be real.

To be that way as a person and as a merchant, and to have the products themselves embody it. That resolve is what the brand name carries.

Asian craft, American frame

What we make brings together the precision of Asian craftsmanship and the boldness of American patterns.

Short and wide. Clean in line, yet following the body.

Reproducing the look of the old years as faithfully as we can, while bringing the way it wears into the present. Twenty years of accumulated work go into that single point.

From tanning the hide to your hands

Our origin is a leather garment factory established in Shandong Province in 1984.

Production was outsourced at first. Today we run two factories of our own in Shandong with a staff of nearly one hundred, handling everything ourselves, tanning, sewing, and selling.

It is this integrated setup that lets us hold prices down without giving up quality. The line at the top of this page is not an aspiration; it is what this structure makes real.

Even so, the supply chain is only the foundation. What drives us is the enthusiast's original impulse: if the leather jacket I want doesn't exist, I'll make it myself.

History

Reinterpreting the classics through a new generation's eyes, and offering a different kind of choice to everyone who loves vintage culture the way we do.

With gratitude, and gladly, we keep going.

REAL SIMONS