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Uniqlo is tapping into the energy of London through its partnerships to bring added purpose to its bricks-and-mortar locations.

The sustainable clothing brand opened the doors to a new store on Regent Street last week. Its 1,900 square metres of store space reinforces the company's commitment to the UK and provides an opportunity to leverage some of Uniqlo's cultural partnerships.

John C Jay, president of global creative for Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing, revealed that connecting on a neighbourhood level with London was key to its global strategy.

He told ±±¾©Èü³µpk10: "If you look deeper into our contributions, the neighbourhood part of London is a very important part of our strategy. We did want to enter the city again at its centre, but we understand the energy that's happening throughout the neighbourhoods where all this new talent is coming from.

"We work at the high level in all those fancy art institutions but we also work at the schools like St Martin's and with a lot of neighbourhood NGOs as well."

Last year Uniqlo entered into a three-year global collaboration with Tate Modern that aimed to build on the success of its initial partnership with the gallery, which began in 2016. The partnership includes the Uniqlo Tate Play programme, where the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is routinely transformed into a space in which children and adults can learn and grow to appreciate art together via a spectacular installation that mixes art with play.

As part of its 20th-anniversary celebration, Uniqlo has chosen to celebrate the spirit of London. In recognition of its long-term partnership, Uniqlo and Tate collaborated on an open call for Tate Collective, Tate's membership for 16- to 25-year-olds, who were invited to respond creatively to the theme "The Spirit of London".

Winning artists Rosie Haynes, Flatboy and Yolande Mutale each created a series of 12 digital art pieces that showed what they love about London. These works will now feature on the stairway walls of Uniqlo's new Regent Street store. Jay explained that this was really representative of the brand's determination to support new talent and young people.

The three-story store is a 19th century Grade 2 listed building that features a Grade 1 listed dome space on the lower ground floor, which once existed as a fully operational barber shop in the 1920s. This area is now home to a display for Uniqlo's Masterpiece collection and the Uniqlo Repair Studio, which provides simple and elevated repair services based on the Japanese Sashiko stitching technique.

Repairing items as opposed to disposing of them fits neatly into the brand's sustainability ethos, and encourages customers to keep items for a longer time with the Japanese Sashiko stitching technique, a homage to the fact the brand was originally founded in Yamaguchi, Japan.

Jay added: "It is about repairing clothes, in a regular, but elevated, way. It becomes an art form, how one repairs a tear, how one adds art to the tear. It's a technique and a tradition dating back hundreds of years in Japan. Uniqlo has other stores that have had repair centres, but this one is deeply embedded with culture."

With sustainability becoming a focus for many high street retailers, Uniqlo understands that at times it can be seen as quite a modest brand that doesn't make the most noise about its green credentials. However, there is the belief that its starting point is strong and its investment in brand purpose will outshine its shyness when it comes to marketing.

"We're a rather modest brand; there's a certain almost shyness to us, which doesn't always make for great marketing sometimes. We're a very true and honest kind of brand and this comes from the founder and his spirit. Think about our Japanese root;, it's a culture that worships nature and that synergy with nature and everyday life is inseparable. That's the starting point for the brand.

"You've got the craft and you've got the technology meeting together. So we have a lot of opportunities to do something new and that's what we're searching for. So [our sustainable values] come from a very deep place, long before Western marketing made the term 'sustainability' a buzzword."