Over the last year, the Goshi exfoliating towel has emerged as a bona fide break-out grooming hit. It's a piece of cloth made to wash your body. It's made in Gunma, Japan, a prefecture that's been in the textile business for nearly 1,500 years. And there's not much more to it than that, except that its texture is precision-engineered to scrub away dead skin and other gunk from your body. After using it, your body will feel cleaner than it has in a long time—particularly if you're new to the revitalizing wonders of exfoliating.
Goshi
At the same time, the Goshi towel has become as a dark-horse contender for streetwear’s grooming product of choice. In January, the brand redid its typically austere gray towel in neon yellow for a collaboration with Tyler, the Creator's cheery L.A. label Golf Wang. In early June, Goshi linked with Brain Dead to drop a version in a saccharine shade of bubblegum pink.
A shower scrub might not seem like a natural item to be releasing in limited edition drops, and it’s popularity among the streetwear set represents a startling degree of success for a brand that launched a little over a year ago. Goshi founder Garrett Gutierrez attributes the brand's sudden ubiquity to the quality and unique make of the product itself. He's not shy about pointing out how other exfoliating towels on the market can be abrasive and harsh. Goshi’s, Gutierrez maintains, is just rough enough to exfoliate. (He likens washing your body without incorporating a regular exfoliation routine to brushing your teeth without flossing. When you wash but don’t exfoliate, Gutierrez says, “you’re only doing half the job”.)
If all that doesn’t sound like the usual selling points for a red-hot brand collaboration, well, the times they are a-changin’. Men, and young men in particular, have become deeply invested in the nuances of caring for their bodies, and the scope of what constitute a promising collaboration in the streetwear world is rapidly expanding. Gutierrez refers to both Golf Wang and Brain Dead as “friends of Goshi”, each respective collaboration the result of relationships he cultivated long before the brand was around. Working with Golf Wang felt appropriately “out of left field”, but it was also pretty natural given Tyler’s particularity about his own skincare routine and staunch advocacy for investing in personal hygiene. In 2021, as it turns out, a streetwear-approved shower scrubber makes perfect sense.
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By Avidan Grossman
