Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

by W. David Marx

“The dominant concepts of masculinity instruct that men should not be too aware of what they wear or take too much time considering what they wear. The suit provides the answer to this modern dictate on the seriousness of masculinity; it is a uniform that can be worn every day and allows men to look good without having to consider their outfits too much and therefore becoming feminine.”

films mostly influenced womenswear, because Japanese society already accepted that women should follow global trends. Cinema did little to convince older men to dress up. Lacking any knowledge about fashion, men needed more than just visual inspiration. They needed detailed explanations on how to put together a basic wardrobe.

In the spring of 1963, Kurosu started a column in Men’s Club called “Ivy Leaguers on the Street” (Machi no Aibii Riigaazu), where he and a photographer took snaps of young passers-by in Ginza who dressed similar to East Coast preps. Kurosu picked the best images and wrote accompanying captions. Nicknamed Machi-ai, the photo page soon became readers’ favorite part of the magazine.

Beyond spreading knowledge about Ivy clothing, this homosocial one-upmanship brought fashion—previously belittled as a “feminine” pursuit—closer to technical “masculine” hobbies such as car repair and sports.

In 1963, Kensuke Ishizu laid down the master concept for Western dress in Japanese with just three letters: “TPO,” an acronym for “time, place, occasion.” Ishizu believed that men should choose outfits based on the time of the day and season, their destination, and the nature of the event.

“With Heibon Punch, I first realized that it was okay to wear something other than my student uniform. The arrival of the magazine in 1964 heralded the very idea that men were allowed to dress up.”

Tokyo developers summarily leveled old wooden structures to build bland, concrete apartment complexes. Kurosu told Men’s Club, “Japan is much older than America, but no one thinks about protecting the classic feel of a place. They just build everything modern, not thinking at all about whether there is a balance to the buildings around it. It’s really sad.”

In the history of Japanese fashion, Ivy marked a critical moment in the 1960s when men started dressing up, but more importantly, the look set the pattern on how the country would import, consume, and modify American fashion for the next fifty years. After Ivy, Japan had an infrastructure to create and disseminate the latest in American styles—not just the clothes of clean-cut New England youth, but even the wilder looks of the counterculture.

When these working-class teens emerged as consumers, they did not follow the leads of their socioeconomic betters, but instead gravitated towards a new set of styles. As anthropologist Ikuya Satō discovered, blue-collar teenagers thought college kids were “effeminate and affected” and wanted clothing that manifested “outright showmanship tinged with deliberate vulgarity.”

From a young age, Yamazaki came to understand that “all cool fashion is delinquent fashion.”

Broadly speaking, the American styles that are subsumed into the Japanese media-consumer complex tend to become static—like exhibits in a museum—because brands and magazines needed to build explicit rules about what is and what is not part of the style. Much of the Japanese “reverence” for America came not just from bookish obsessives like Toshiyuki Kurosu preaching the look as part of an evangelist mission, but from the fashion industry’s functional needs to sell it.

“Ivy is a lot like tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet). It was originally German but now it’s just part of Japanese cuisine. You serve it with rice and miso soup and eat it with chopsticks. I think Ivy is becoming like tonkatsu. It may have originally come from America 60 years ago, but after 60 years of being in Japan, it’s been arranged to better fit us.”

As a start, urban consumers did not need nice interior goods because no one entertained in their cramped apartments. And between a lack of facilities and little free time from work, sports have not been a major part of adult life. By contrast, fashion worked well with the busy, crowded Tokyo lifestyle.

There is a precedence for this idea of “copying towards innovation” in the pedagogy of traditional Japanese arts. 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”).

Nakamura became the patron saint of the twenty-first century’s “Cult of Production,” where customers want to know exactly where and how their products are made. Nakamura believes this is the future: “The Japanese market is getting more mature. The consumers are getting older. People don’t need so much product. They want to have something that has meaning and lasts long. They realize that material things alone don’t bring happiness. We try to produce less. We try to sell less.”

In many ways, China today resembles Japan in the 1970s: a vibrant consumer marketplace that has yet to garner respect for its own tastemaking and cultural production. As much as Chinese shoppers buy up the world’s high-design, no Chinese designers enjoy the same level of recognition as Japanese designers. But there are signs that China will integrate into the entire global fashion scene with great alacrity, starting with Ametora-influenced clothing.

For young Japanese men interested in clothing, they look for guidance from social media channels rather than magazines, which often leads to copying flashy Korean street styles rather than deep dives into the history of American trad.

A globalized world also means Japan has lost its monopoly on selling American vintage clothing. Malaysia and Thailand are emerging as the new centers of secondhand garments and, thanks to their participation on e-commerce sites, easily ship directly to the West.

But the influence of Japan on fashion goes even further: The way we think about clothing follows the postmodern Japanese vision, where anyone can mix and match anything from any era, and authenticity is proven through reverence to older production methods rather than creation within the original communities. It was in Japan where consumers first understood clothing as floating signifiers, where once strict lines between “heritage,” “luxury,” “sportswear,” and “streetwear” collapsed into an inclusive melange.