WHEN ASKED what guides his vision of uniqlo, Tadashi Yanai, its founder and chief executive, pulls off the shelf the 1987 autumn/winter collection catalogue of Next, a mass-market British retailer. All of the clothes are so classic, he says, that they could be worn today. While Inditex of Spain, which owns Zara, and Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden, the world's two largest clothing retailers, slavishly follow fashion trends, uniqlo, the main brand of the third-largest, Fast Retailing, of Japan, sticks to timeless basics.
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