Uniqlo isn’t in the business of chasing trends. Its staples—versatile black pants, reliable oxfords, crisp cotton socks—are available month after month, year after year. A more apt analogue would be the Gap. In its 1990s heyday, the Gap revolutionized American retailing by making basics cool. But the company eventually became a victim of its own success. “When [the Gap] tried to go from having a certain cachet to being in every single mall in every single town in America, the brand lost its edge,” Steve Rowen, a managing partner at Retail Systems Research, told me. Gap clothing became the uniform of suburban moms and dads. Despite the company’s efforts to make its khakis less baggy and its shirts slimmer, no one wants to fall into the Gap anymore—especially when you can get cheaper basics with cleaner lines at Uniqlo.

The question Uniqlo faces now is whether it can inherit the Gap’s empire without repeating its mistakes. To do so, it will have to convince shoppers across the country of a proposition that’s radical for the industry: Fashion can be affordable without being disposable.

Uniqlo has profited from changes in American society, some of which might seem at first glance to be unrelated to fashion. Millennial shoppers entered a job market with fewer jobs, while carrying more student debt, which limited how much money many of them could spend on clothes. (They also entered a workforce that was more amenable than ever to casual attire; where a suit was once called for, chinos and a button-down—or jeans and a hoodie—now suffice.) That austerity contributed to a cultural shift, in which conspicuously expensive clothing fell out of favor. “We went through a period where the logo was dying and nobody wanted to wear a big logo and advertise for the brand,” Jan Rogers Kniffen, a retail consultant, told me. “That’s the Uniqlo customer.”

These shifting mores created an opening in the American market, one that a company as rooted in Japan’s aesthetic history as Uniqlo could ably fill. “Clothing in the West, it’s associated with status, with rank,” Hirotaka Takeuchi, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the brand, told me. In Japan, clothing has traditionally been more standardized. Until the end of the 19th century, when Western influence became more prevalent, kimonos were commonly worn by Japanese people of varying ages and classes. The garment would differ depending on the wearer’s ability to afford fine fabric or embroidery, but compared with the West, where the wealthy telegraphed their status with elaborate styles of dress, such signaling was far more subtle. Takeuchi sees Uniqlo as bringing this old Japanese view of fashion to the U.S. market.

This isn’t to say that people who shop at Uniqlo don’t care about how they look. The company realized that its customers might not want to pay top dollar for pants, but they do want them to fit. A pair of Uniqlo slacks is never going to look like a $200 pair from a high-end competitor. But because Uniqlo offers free tailoring, the pants are probably not going to look like you got them for $40, either. The company may be sensitive to customers’ finances, but it’s alive to their aspirations as well. It offers blouses in silk and sweaters in cashmere. In recent years, Alexander Wang, Jun Takahashi, Tomas Maier, and Jil Sander have all partnered with the company on limited-edition designs, clearly hoping to meet their next generation of devotees where it shops now. For Uniqlo, the collaborations provide a frisson of high fashion, a suggestion that the leading lights of couture appreciate its cheap socks and T-shirts too.