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Compared to the Ivy boom of the Sixties, Japanese youth in the Seventies were not interested in wearing their new fashions as much as they were in owning clothing as a collection of material possessions.
Members of this generation often explain that they love “American culture,” but hate “the American state.”
The company that teenagers once saved up for years to buy was now sold to suburban mothers in supermarkets looking for a bargain on tube socks. With piles of clothing sitting in warehouses, VAN started to run large-scale bargain sales, which further devalued the brand. And in the era of Made in U.S.A. and Popeye actively promoting the purchase of imported honmono (genuine) items rather than copies, VAN just could not compete.
For its first two years, Popeye failed to achieve sales figures that matched its cultural leadership. But the June 10, 1978, issue on VAN was a runaway success—the most popular issue until that point, with 217,000 copies selling out on the spot.
In just ten years, Japan made a cyclical pilgrimage through American looks—from Ivy to hippie to outdoor Heavy Duty to Heavy Duty Ivy to California campus clothes, and now back to East Coast style. On the solemn occasion of VAN’s demise, Ivy style was rising from the ashes.
blue-collar teenagers thought college kids were “effeminate and affected” and wanted clothing that manifested “outright showmanship tinged with deliberate vulgarity.”
these teens found their greatest inspiration in fearless rebels of the past—specifically, Japanese postwar ruffians and archetypal hard-ass juvenile delinquents from 1950s America.
Although the mambo boom quickly faded away, the distinct fashion and the clubs’ dubious clientele turned the word “mambo” into a slang term for “young punk.”
rhythm-and-blues bar called Kaijin 20 Mensō (“The Fiend With Twenty Faces”).
staff dressed in matching leather jackets, jeans, and pompadours. In this dark corner of Shinjuku—a neighborhood otherwise known for radical student protesters and long-hair hippies—Yamazaki gave the country’s greased-up delinquents a place to call their own.
They put their hair up in pompadours, wore menacing black leather jackets and leather pants, and posed astride heavy motorcycles. Weekly Playboy called this look “yankee style,”
a dangerous new kind of juvenile delinquent who occasionally appeared at the bar—the bōsōzoku (the word bōsō meaning “out of control”). These were teenage outlaw biker gangs notorious for group riding, warfare over territory, and extreme styles of dress.
In the mid-1970s, bōsōzoku bikers came to notoriety throughout provincial cities across Japan.
Based on appearances alone, these bikers resembled American “greasers” as closely as VAN fans resembled Ivy League students. But in the bōsōzoku’s case, the teens had little idea about the American origin of the style; they simply copied singer Eikichi Yazawa.
School-aged members wore surgical masks to hide their identities.
Yamazaki became obsessed with George Lucas’ film American Graffiti,
Ultimately, however, the Fifties movement became much bigger than Cream Soda and Yamazaki—it was the central pillar of delinquent style nationwide.
If middle-class teens hated sharing the Fifties craze with working-class teens, the working-class teens really hated the fashion complex sucking all the toughness out of leather jackets, Hawaiian shirts, and jeans.
After Popeye’s “VAN was our teacher” issue in April 1978, Ivy emerged as menswear’s answer to nyūtora and hamatora.
When the 1978 VAN Jacket bankruptcy left a ¥40 billion ($708 million in 2015 dollars) void in the Ivy market, Brooks Brothers seized the opportunity to open its first Japanese store.
Brooks Brothers placed its flagship Aoyama store in a former VAN retail space, on the same street as VAN’s old headquarters.
Tanaka intended his work to satirize Japanese youth’s zealous consumption of foreign brand-name goods. Literary critic Jun Etō got the joke, commending Tanaka on “deconstructing Tokyo’s urban space, seeing it as having turned into an accumulation of symbols.” Teens, on the other hand, just wanted Nantonaku, Kurisutaru for its comprehensive list of trendy restaurants, clothing stores, brands, and Boz Scaggs singles.
Writer Kōhei Kitayama contributed to Popeye in its early days but felt a sense of regret later in life: “Popeye was the magazine that pulled the trigger to start Japan’s materialistic bubble.”
Men’s Club and Popeye called this an Ivy revival, but actual teenagers at the time took more interest in Ivy’s younger and more contemporary form, Preppy (or Preppie). Men’s Club beat everyone—including most Americans—to the punch with a December 1979 cover story on “What is Preppie?”
A year later, Preppies went mainstream in the U.S. with the November 1980 publication of Lisa Birnbach’s The Official Preppy Handbook.
The foremost fashion guru for the Preppy era was a familiar face—the seventy-year-old Kensuke Ishizu. Thanks to the Popeye issue on VAN, the once disgraced businessman retook his position as the highest authority on Ivy style.
In 1983, men twenty to twenty-four bought 46 percent more clothing than the average Japanese, and women of the same age bought 69 percent more.
Preppy may have lacked a deeper spiritual resonance, but it remains important today as the landmark moment when Japanese culture began to experience global trends in real time. Hirofumi Kurino, former Beams employee and senior advisor of Creative Direction at United Arrows, explains, “What was most interesting is that Japan and America had the same exact fashion craze at that moment. There was no lag, no gap.
Once Japanese teens could keep up with the rest of the world, the local fashion industry started to consider how to stay ahead of the curve.
Trad shops catering to the women’s market—dressing couples in matching madras blazers and yellow button-down oxfords—were the beginning of the end for the Preppy look. Womenswear cycled through trends at a much faster rate than menswear, so when the women’s fashion media started to tell the Ivy girls to ditch the stodgy prep look and try something more radical, girlfriends pulled their boyfriends along.
Avant-garde designers Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto made their joint Paris debut in 1981 with a show centered on the theme of “destitution.” Their asymmetrical lines, intentional imperfections, and torn-up industrial-grade fabrics within a black monochromatic palette stunned the European fashion community. But the two designers’ eventual success turned “Japanese fashion” into a full-fledged movement on the global stage and brought new attention to innovative predecessors Issey Miyake and Kenzō Takada.
The second half of the 1980s thus became known as the Bubble Era, where unbridled economic optimism bred extravagant and decadent living.
Rich Tokyo natives did not have to study fashion in magazines; they absorbed good style from their fathers and older brothers (who, of course, had learned it from Men’s Club).
Tokyo’s rich suburban teens in the mid-1980s devised a new style called amekaji (“American casual”)—comfortable clothing from classic brands such as Brooks Brothers, Levi’s, and Nike. Amekaji was a return to American basics, but looser and sportier than Preppy.
In the world of amekaji, anything American could be thrown together: East Coast prep, West Coast athletic, hip-hop, Hollywood, and Native American jewelry.
Shibuya became headquarters of the amekaji movement.
After three years of buying designer brands, the mass customer base and bargain sales killed any cachet the designer brands once enjoyed.
“Shibukaji was cool because of Shibuya, not because of America. All the fashion items in shibukaji were American, but ‘America’ was not something that existed above them. It was something on their level.”
The easy combination of classic American labels, loose-fitting clothing, and sneakers ultimately attracted more people into the apparel market than ever before. Unlike with the DC boom, teens did not need specialized knowledge, nor credit cards, nor a willingness to forgo personal comfort.
Select shops like Beams, United Arrows, and Ships, by contrast, continued to grow strongly in the 1990s. Their “editorial” format of curating international brands allowed them to flow with the changing styles while always being the go-to location for buying basics.
in 1991, the media spent the rest of the decade struggling to define a singular look for the era. Monolithic trends splintered into a variety of menswear styles, all categorized under the word kei (“style”).
Fujiwara never wanted to create a mass market brand or run a large company, often to the chagrin of his business partners. In 1995, at the very height of Goodenough’s popularity, Fujiwara made the capricious decision that the brand would take a six-month hiatus. He also decided to cut the number of retailers from forty to ten. Nigo and Jonio took inspiration from this move, pulling their brands from stores in other cities and limiting point of sales to their own managed shops. Although this retail method seems counterintuitive for a hit brand, it was a necessary move to maintain an exclusive
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Designer lines like Comme des Garçons used avant-garde designs and devilish prices to keep its products away from the masses. The Ura-Harajuku labels, on the other hand, sold basic, casual items that were relatively affordable. Getting Goodenough or A Bathing Ape to everyone who wanted them would torpedo the brands’ cachet. The most obvious solution was to make less.
created a fierce consumer mania. They called the low production runs “limited-edition”—motivating teens to collect their clothing rather than simply wear it.
In the 1990s, teens could choose from nearly every brand in the world—yet they preferred Japanese labels.
Despite needing to talk through an interpreter, Nigo and Williams became close friends, and, within hours, planned out a series of joint collaborations.
Nigo stepped in to help design Williams’s shoe line ICECREAM,
Nigo and Sk8thing then turned Williams’s plan for a clothing line called Billionaire Boys Cl...
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Once Bape mania waned in the United States, however, the financial situation quickly began to deteriorate. After two years of declining sales and mounting debt, Nigo stepped down as CEO of Nowhere in 2009
To keep goods in stock, vintage stores relied on individuals like Ōtsubo and Kusakabe to hunt for rare items across the Pacific and send them back regularly by boat.
