Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (BASIC BOOKS/PER)

by W. David Marx

the Japanese—like the Arabs protecting Aristotelian physics in the Dark Ages—had safeguarded America’s sartorial history while the United States spent decades making Dress Down Friday an all-week affair.

the world is besieged by “Coca-colonization.”

Inside the Ivy system, students wore blazers to class, duffle coats in winter, three-button suits to weddings, tuxedos to parties, and school scarfs to football games.

Inside the Heavy Duty system, men wore L. L. Bean duck boots in bad weather, mountain boots when hiking, flannel shirts when canoeing, collegiate nylon windbreakers in spring, rugby shirts in fall, and cargo shorts when on the trail.

Made in U.S.A. kicked off the Heavy Duty trend, but the “Heavy Duty Ivy Party Manifesto” widely popularized the style as town wear.

Youth no longer bought things as an avenue towards new experiences—record players to listen to jazz LPs, suits to impress girls, mountain parkas for hiking. Youth fetishized goods as goods.

“All of us maintained at the time that the ‘United States’ and ‘America’ were two different things. Coke, Major League Baseball, and Hollywood are all American, and we thought that you could separate those from the government.”

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.

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).

Web sites Valet, Put This On, and even GQ.com lectured fashion beginners through numbered lists and concrete steps to explain the assembly of a classic wardrobe.

Fuck Yeah Menswear to

In flower arrangement and martial arts, students learn the basics by imitating the kata, a single authoritative “form.” Pupils must first protect the kata, but after many years of study, they break from tradition and then separate to make their own kata—a system described in the term shu-ha-ri (“protecting, breaking, and separating”).

Fashion writer Derek Guy adds, “If global consumers were into Japanese brands because of their novelty, that novelty wore off a long time ago. Japanese brands are popular because they offer something special in the market.”