AiE, Nepenthes most recent imprint, is still chugging along with no UK, or to my knowledge western stockists. Looking at this I’m not entirely surprised. It’s enough to make even the most effete Soho fash-hag totter away in terror.

Charged with the kind of feral lunacy usually found in servants of the moon. This is quite probably a cursed garment. To wear it is to consciously submit to a unique, fabricated form of lycanthropy. Be warned, you may actually grow a snout.

Would I wear it? No. Am I glad it exists? Yeah, why not. To most eyes it’ll appear ugly, but it’s at least interesting. If only to imagine the level of tenacity required to actually wear it. Off-the-peg self-assured wouldn’t cut it. You’d need nuclear-level nerve. You’d have to have some fairly nuclear chi-ching too; you’re looking at over 300 coins to snare this particular beast.

You’ve got to half wonder if this was made just because they could? Maybe just for fun. At the very least only intended for the more outré end of the Japanese market. It really is some kind of freaky mammalian mosh-pit – part Carpenter’s The Thing, part Terry Scott in Carry On Up the Jungle. Repellently alluring. It’s like some ghastly inter-species orgy cut short by a tractor’s tyre.