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.
