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Marcelo Costa’s Obsessive Pursuit of the Perfect T-Shirt through Japanese Craftsmanship

RANDOM/RANDOM uses the world’s rarest cottons while balancing minimalist design with limited-edition photographic artworks that transform simple garments into wearable canvases

CH Editors

10 June 2026

The world does not need another t-shirt brand. At least, that’s the obvious conclusion with an apparel market overflowing with labels promising better fabrics, better fits, better sustainability credentials and better versions of the same essential garment. Yet for Marcelo Pena Costa, founder of New York-based menswear label RANDOM/RANDOM, the t-shirt remains an unfinished design problem.

Costa arrives at fashion from an unconventional direction. Over the last 25 years, he has built brands, launched startups and worked across design, advertising and luxury sectors in New York, London and Brazil, including stints at McCann and Well Well. A photographer and creative director by trade, he approaches clothing less as fashion and more as a form of industrial design—an object to be examined, refined and reconsidered through endless iteration. What began as an art project inside his creative studio gradually evolved into a pursuit of what he calls the “perfect blank:” a garment so thoughtfully considered in material, construction and proportion that it could disappear into everyday life while remaining quietly exceptional.

That pursuit eventually led him to Japan. After searching globally for manufacturing partners, Costa found himself drawn to the country’s culture of craftsmanship, where concepts like shokunin—the lifelong mastery of a single craft—and kodawari, an obsessive attention to detail, shape the way products are made. Both concepts stem from Japanese craft vernacular, of course. Today, RANDOM/RANDOM produces its garments in Japan using some of the world’s rarest cottons, including Suvin Platinum, while balancing minimalist design with limited-edition photographic artworks that transform simple garments into wearable canvases.

We spoke with Costa about perfection, permanence, Japanese craftsmanship and why, despite an impossibly crowded marketplace, he believes there is still room for one more T-shirt.

COOL HUNTING: At what point did your pursuit of the “perfect t-shirt” become serious enough to build a brand around?
Marcelo Pena Costa: RANDOM/RANDOM started as an art project within my creative studio, so I would say that from day one the brand was there. Creating brands and building them is what I have been doing for 25 years, since I started my career in design and advertising. Now, I would reorder the factors to say that when I started to have recurrent purchases from people, I realized the pursuit for the perfect garment became not only serious enough, but a necessity. We needed to deliver a garment at the same level of the art printed on it. One elevates the other. I’m really obsessed with making things with excellence, so it was only a natural path that followed.

CH: After years working across creative agencies, startups, and luxury brands, what did you feel was missing from menswear?
MPC: Elevated pieces that you can wear anytime. Garments you can wear confidently in any occasion: an important celebration, an important meeting, etc. My goal is to resignify t-shirts and similar pieces. We want to go deeper into why these garments exist and allow people to style them in different ways. Fashion in my view has two purposes: functionality, that has to do with protection for our bodies, and self-confidence and expression. One cannot live without the other.

CH: RANDOM/RANDOM talks a lot about permanence and restraint. What do those ideas mean to you personally?
MPC: Conceptually RANDOM/RANDOM is about this juxtaposition of permanence and impermanence. The first is about making things that last longer. Personally, it’s a necessity. We as humankind have just been producing so many things. We need to make less things that last longer. This is not a luxury or a marketing angle. This is our obligation as a functioning society.

CH: You describe the garments as “wearable blank canvases.” What makes simplicity so compelling to you?
MPC: I grew up in Brasília, Brazil, the modernist city designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Everyone who is a fan of architecture knows that it’s one of the good examples of minimalistic design. Later I trained as a designer in London, studying typography, with a big influence of the Swiss design school. Also minimalistic and pragmatic. For me the same principles apply to fashion and clothing. I believe you can have character in small and less overt details.

CH: Why was manufacturing in Japan such an essential part of RANDOM/RANDOM from the beginning?
MPC: I went everywhere to find the right manufacturer. Portugal, Vietnam, US, China, Brazil, etc. All these places have fantastic manufacturing capabilities. Japan is above all though. We could not find the quality in materials and craft that we found there. So again, we needed to find simply the perfect canvas and attention to detail to be the perfect medium for the art we wanted to portray.

CH: What initially drew you to rare cottons like Suvin Platinum?
MPC: I’ll be honest here. When we start a collection, everything starts by going through swatches of fabrics. It’s about the touch, everything else comes after. Suvin is this incredible cotton that has such a distinct and unique texture that when you touch it, it’s impossible not to say, “Wow, what is this?” I realized later that it was the perfect material to print, because of its physical properties and density. The fabric we use, made with Suvin cotton, is 32-gauge, which means it’s dense enough for direct-to-garment printing. I learned that the Japanese are experts in searching for the best cotton yarns out there and specialists in extra-long staple cottons—that’s the fiber length. The longer the fiber, the more refined and smooth the cotton will be. Suvin was the first, but we also have organic Supima from California and Arizona, Giza from Egypt, Australian extra-long staple and Sea Island cotton. All ultra-luxe.

CH: The collection includes different weights, textures, and silhouettes. What details do you obsess over most when developing a t-shirt?
MPC: Like I said, the touch comes first, then finding the appropriate fabric and weight for each occasion or weather. Then the cut, the silhouette which will determine the style we want to portray with our garments. Finally, I’m extremely obsessed with construction, the type of seams we’re using, the measurements of each part of the garment, such as hem, neck lines, etc. All those light details will give the garment its character.

CH: What did working with Japanese mills and factories teach you about craftsmanship and precision?
MPC: This is an interesting one. There are two things in Japanese culture that I’m mostly attracted to: shokunin and kodawari, which are respectively a master in one specific craft and their relentless pursuit of perfection. It is a pure commitment to the highest perfection in anything you do. You can be shokunin making sushi or making t-shirts. There’s Jiro Ono, famous owner and chef at Sukiyabashi Jiro, who is 90 years old and has been making sushi for 50 years now. He still thinks he hasn’t achieved his peak yet. That’s a shokunin right there. Humbly speaking, we want to do the same for t-shirts and garments. I was in Japan last year and asked one of our partners why Japanese are famous for perfection. He simply said that communication is the key to achieving perfection. So there is also this other very pragmatic side of Japanese culture and way of making things.

CH: The Neal Slavin collaboration feels especially aligned with the brand’s philosophy. How did that partnership come about?
MPC: Neal is a friend. My daughter was his intern. When we had the idea to create RANDOM/RANDOM he was probably the first photographer that I reached out to. He’s also based in SoHo and his work is timeless. Neal is truly a master. It was all very fluid and natural. As much as photographs are staged, Neal is a master at capturing the exact right moment and letting randomness breathe. I showed him some of the other photos I had from my archives and everything clicked immediately.

CH: What’s next for RANDOM/RANDOM, both creatively and regarding the brand’s future expansion plans?
MPC: The first thing is our shop in Nolita on Mott Street opening in October. That will be our home, and everyone is invited. We plan a lot of events there. The shop will be another physical expression of the brand and its philosophy. I’m also super excited about a few new designs we’re launching this Fall and Spring 2027. They will include incredible blends of cotton, cashmere and silk, both for t-shirts and sweatshirts. We will go even deeper using incredible materials. From 2027 and beyond, we also see a natural expansion to Europe, first with pop-ups and then eventually opening a second shop there. I’m very excited about what’s next and cannot wait to see how RANDOM/RANDOM will materialize in many different ways.

Read Culture

Static and Signal: Prada Mode Tunes in at the Hotel Chelsea

For its 14th iteration, Prada’s itinerant private club takes over a New York landmark with Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima

Mike Tommasiello

9 June 2026

Most brand programming asks you to stand still and look. Prada Mode asks you to move through something. For three days at the Hotel Chelsea, the company’s itinerant private club turned one of New York‘s most storied buildings into a working broadcast, a sci-fi set and an argument about what it means to make anything at all. The 14th edition is called Satellites II, and it played less like an exhibition and more like a signal—one you can tune into and walk through.

The collaborators are Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima, two men whose friendship has become its own medium. Satellites II extends Satellites, the show they staged at Prada Aoyama Tokyo in the summer of 2025, which used their dialogue to trace the lines between love, language and creativity. The New York chapter widens that frame—across cultures, across media, across a city—and threads it through the romantic mythology of the Chelsea itself. The result is not a tribute to either artist. It is a study of the space between them.

A Club That Keeps Moving

Prada Mode began at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, conceived as a members’ club that refuses to stay put. Each edition lands in a different city, timed to a cultural moment like an art fair or festival, and hands its concept to a different collaborator. The first was Theaster Gates, who built a club around Black music and identity inside the fair. Since then the program has touched down in Hong Kong and London, Paris and Shanghai, Moscow and Los Angeles, Dubai, Tokyo, Seoul, and most recently across Osaka and Inujima Island in Japan. The collaborator list reads like a syllabus: Damien Hirst, Ava DuVernay, Martine Syms, Kazuyo Sejima, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, Jia Zhangke.

What holds the editions together is not a look but a posture. Prada Mode treats hospitality as a form: workshops and panels by day, performances and dinners by night, a membership granted entry to all of it. New York’s edition is the first time the club has set itself inside a building with this much of its own history and Satellites II leans into that tension rather than smoothing it over.

Satellites, Continued

Refn and Kojima are an unlikely pair only on paper. One makes neon-soaked, slow-burning films, the other builds games that play like cinema you can walk inside. Both work in worlds defined by mood, dread and the long pause. Satellites took their friendship as its premise: the idea that creativity is relational, that it moves between people the way a signal moves between two points in orbit. Satellites II keeps the metaphor and lets it travel. The exhibition spans languages, cultures and spaces, built around the two artists’ ongoing exchange of images, ideas and obsessions.

On the opening day, that exchange went public in the form of conversation. Two talks set the register: “Arrogance of Youth,” with actress and musician Sophie Thatcher joining Refn and Kojima, and “Artists We Love,” with filmmaker Abel Ferrara. The dialogues circled a single, durable idea on the need to create, and the failure built into the act of creating. Not failure as a setback, but failure as the cost of admission.

The Hotel as Instrument

The staging uses the Chelsea as more than a backdrop. Satellites II unfolds across the building’s layered architecture, moving between the lobby, corridors and guest rooms, letting the progression do the thematic work. A classical-but-progressive science-fiction aesthetic reimagines the historic setting, so the place feels at once like itself and a transmission of itself.

During the private program, select guest rooms functioned as micro television studios, staging original performances for invited participants. Later, those same rooms reopened to the public as deliberate installations, the studio becoming the artifact. The space is not a container for the art. The space is the art, caught mid-broadcast.

Tune In: The Prada Mode Channel

The Prada Mode Channel is a broadcast built in the vein of a cable station, made in collaboration with Mikael Bertelsen, and you can watch it from anywhere. It leaned hard into analogue television tropes—talk shows, horoscopes, the low-grade intimacy of programming that runs whether or not anyone is watching. It is nostalgia used as a tool, not a mood. The channel turned the exhibition into something with a frequency, a way of reaching past the velvet rope of a members’ club and into the ambient static of a screen.

That instinct ran through the opening night and its lineup. The Velveteers played; Lydia Lunch performed as singer, poet, and writer; Precious took the stage alongside a DJ set from William Benton; KROM ran a kendama workshop and the Nordic bakery Juno ran another. The night ended downtown at Katz’s Delicatessen, where Grandmaster Flash, Justin Strauss and Papi Juice turned a hundred-year-old deli into a dance floor. The throughline is range—high and low, analogue and live, all of it treated as equal input.

When the Doors Open

Satellites II ran as a private members’ program on 3-4 June, then opened to the public from 5-7 June, 2026, at the Hotel Chelsea. The timing was deliberate, coinciding with the Tribeca Festival, planting itself in the middle of the city’s early-summer cultural rush.

The public days did not shrink the project; they expanded it. The rooms that served as television studios reopened as installations and the footprint spread beyond the hotel into the city. Site-specific works extended downtown to the Prada Broadway Epicenter and Katz’s, and Refn and Kojima curated a Japanese anime festival screening at the Angelika Film Center. A live program of talks, concerts, screenings, performances and reinterpreted broadcast formats ran alongside the exhibition, with curated dining woven through. The members’ club became, for three days, a public one.

There’s an argument underneath all of it. Prada Mode is built on access—who gets in and when—and Satellites II spent its first two days as a closed signal before broadcasting wide. The Hotel Chelsea, a building that has always traded on the romance of the people who passed through it, is the right place to make that point. A satellite is only useful once it sends something back down. For three public days in June, this one did.