Ametora by W. David Marx
Ametora by W. David Marx
How Japan Saved American Style
"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." The Japanese at first shortened the words "American traditional" to Ametora, but now an entire set of Ametora practices stands as its own separate tradition.
What I’m stealing
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Commentary
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Supplemental Resources
Michael Williams of ACL scans of Take Ivy from 2008
Kamakura Shirts A-Z of the Ivy Look
F.E. Castleberry Brand Board and Look Book No. 06
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
When farmers and urban merchants began to accumulate more wealth than their samurai betters, they lined standard cotton robes with silk in an act of subversive panache (Page 2)
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." (Page 16)
Ishizu joined the editorial team, and the quarterly publication Otoko no Fukushoku ("Men's Clothing") debuted in late 1954. The magazine offered fashion photography and articles, but the editorial tone was pure instruction-a textbook introduction to semi-formal wear, business wear, sportswear, and golf wear. (Page 17)
He wrote so much for the first few years that he had to hide his work under playful pen names such as "Esu Kaiya" (Esquire) in fear that his authorship was too conspicuous (Page 19)
Japan's elite campuses were packed with identical-looking boys in black wool uniforms, but Ivy League students dressed up for classes in a distinct, individual way (Page 21)
Japanese students in the late 1950s had little pocket money, but Ivy clothing would be a good investment durable, functional, and based on static, traditional styles.
And there was something chic about how Ivy students wore items until they disintegrated-holes in shoes, frayed collars on shirts, patches on jacket elbows. Many nouveau riche Japanese would gasp in horror at this frugality, but the old-money Ishizu saw an immediate link between Ivy League fashion and the rakish, rough look of hei'i habō, the early twentieth century phenomenon of elite students flaunting prestige through shabby uniforms. Ivy clothing signaled status through subtle underplay, something that Ishizu could feel in his old money blood. (Page 23)
Kurosu and Hozumi liked Ivy in part because it was from the United States, which impoverished Japanese viewed as a beacon of civilization and prosperity (Page 30)
I didn't like it just because it was new, but because it was strange (Page 30)
, "It has to feel natural. It's the absolute worst if other people think you've left them intentionally unbuttoned." (Page 39)
The classic "Ivy look" was far more stylized-a straight part on the side of the head that split the hair into two blocks at a seven-three or eight-two ratio. (Page 45)
in New England, they saw families routinely modernize the insides of their houses while keeping the exterior design intact. This felt poignant at a time when 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." During the trip, Kurosu awoke to something that Kensuke Ishizu always said: Ivy represented veneration for tradition, not just chasing the latest modern trend (Page 59)
Kensuke Ishizu wanted Ivy League style to become Japan's permanent template for basic fashion (Page 70)
The older clientele still loved American style but found the word “Ivy” increasingly toxic. Kurosu smartly recast the Kent style under a new term—“Trad” (traddo). Kurosu told American blog "The Trad" in 2010, "The word 'traditional'
existed but it was difficult to pronounce and rarely used in Japan (Page 71)
Trad men could wear a classic Burberry jacket or Irish fisherman's sweater and not worry about breaking the strict "Americaonly" rules of Ivy (Page 71)
Ishizu was a gifted designer and marketer, but he made his fortune in a form of cultural arbitrage. Kurosu says, "All VAN would do is create things that they had in America but not in Japan. We'd just copy, but no one realized what we were doing. (Page 72)
cotton drill used on the soles of traditional tabi socks (Page 75)
American soldiers on R&R from the Korean War. No longer confined to their uniforms, soldiers wandered around Tokyo in worn-in jeans, CPO shirts, lambswool v-neck sweaters in primary colors, white socks, and loafers (Page 78)
During the autopsy, Kashino puzzled over a strange detail in the fabric: the blue cotton threads were not dyed all the way through.
Compared to other dyestuffs, indigo does not easily permeate to the core of cotton. So industrial indigo dyeing tends to create a blue ring around the thread's surface and leave the center white.
But it is precisely this defect that gives jeans their unique beauty:
when heavy wear scuffs away the indigo, the undyed cotton pops out to create expressive and subtle layers of fading.
Japanese craftsmen had been expertly dyeing with indigo since the seventh century, but their traditional method-repeatedly dipping yarn in tubs of fermented organic dye, then twisting the yarn to oxidize the color-fully permeates the cotton fibers with blue coloring. (Page 81)
Cone Mills's "686," a 14.5oz preshrunk denim used in Levi's straight-leg zipper-fly 505s.
Kurabō first needed to retool its machinery to spin heavy cotton yarns previously unknown in Japan. Next the company searched for a partner who could dye indigo in a way that produced the "white-center" of American denim.
Kurabō eventually called upon Kaihara in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, an imperially-recognized dyer and weaver of kasuri cloth used in traditional kimonos since 1893. (Page 93)
Japan's YKK provided the zippers, while Mitsubishi and Jüki regauged their sewing machines to handle thick denim (Page 93)
The Japanese could understand hippies as the latest trend in American music and fashion, but the Whole Earth Catalog moved along a completely different vector (Page 100)
In 1970, Kobayashi and Ishikawa returned to New York for another round of “Illustrated Reportage." This time around, Brand's vision looked prescient. “Being back in New York after a year,”
Kobayashi wrote in his column, “the thing I feel most strongly is young Americans' attitudes about going ‘back to nature.” Kobayashi had long considered the United States the "Kingdom of the Automobile," yet he found men and women intentionally running around Central Park-a new form of exercise called "jogging.” (Page 100)
Since Japan lacked a culture of mail order, making such a catalog felt magical and foreign-like Americans.
producing a book of ukiyo-e woodblock prints (Page 106)
thirteen pieces of Abercrombie & Fitch safari-print luggage (Page 106)
pictorial manifesto (Page 107)
While the rustic Americana of Heavy Duty looked very different from the polished Americana of Japan's 1960s Ivy boom, Kobayashi believed that Heavy Duty and Ivy were two sides of the same coin. Both were "systems" of clothing-a wide set of traditional garments worn according to the time, place, and occasion.
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. In the introduction to his standalone Heavy Duty Book, Kobayashi wrote, "I call Heavy Duty 'traditional' because it's the outdoor or country part of the trad clothing system. You could even say that it's the outdoor version of Ivy (Page 109)
"Heavy Duty Ivy Party Manifesto." He called for a new hybrid look called "Heavy Duty Ivy" (hebi-ai) (Page 110)
passersby asked them if they had forgotten to take off their life jackets after yachting (Page 112)
cultural milieu-"polo shirts." This sounded insane: in Japan, only middle-aged golfers wore polo shirts. Kobayashi countered that they were the favorite of UCLA and USC students. This convinced Kinameri and Ishikawa, who, right then and there, agreed to focus their new magazines on the athletic lifestyle of West Coast teens. (Page 112)
West Coast teens invented new sports, wore new kinds of clothing, and took up new healthy values (Page 113)
For the debut issue, Popeye editors focused on the accessible sport of skateboarding as a way to turn young readers on to athletics. The magazine's coverage of the California-based skate movement was not just new to Japan but timely even by American standards. Just a year before Popeye's debut issue, Skateboarder magazine re-opened, the legendary Zephyr Productions' "Z-Boys"
team formed in Santa Monica, and the Del Mar Fairgrounds hosted the first major skateboarding tournament since the 1960s. (Page 114)
Then, in 1977, surfer fashion left the beaches and went urban. Thousands of teens in fake tans, tank tops, short shorts, bead belts, and rainbow flip-flops amassed on the streets of Tokyo's Shibuya and Roppongi neighborhoods (Page 115)
This pursuit of profit, however, drained the brand of any cachet. (Page 119)
Yamazaki came to understand that "all cool fashion is delinquent fashion." (Page 125)
Beams F. Inspired in part by the look of affluent teens in California's Newport Beach, Shigematsu stocked brands popular with American college students such as Brooks Brothers, L. L. Bean, and Lacoste. He also discovered a high-end, Massachusetts-based shoe brand called Alden and brought their merchandise to Japan for the first time (Page 152)
famed Ivy League retailer J. Press (Page 152)
Ralph Lauren, Alexander Julian, Alan Flusser, and Jeffrey Banks (Page 153)
Jaeger English luxury knit brand, loved by Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, (Page 155)
weejuns, L. L. Bean rubber moccasins, Brooks Brothers loafers, Gucci loafers, white bucks, L. L. Bean bluchers, Sperry Top-Siders and canvas deck shoes, Tretorn sneakers, wing tips, and patent leather opera pumps (Page 158)
Novelist William Gibson once wrote that Japanese youth shopping chain PARCO made "Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana."
In 2010, people around the world snapped up reprints of the rare 1965 Japanese photo collection Take Ivy, a documentary of student style on the Ivy League campuses. The surprising craze for the book helped popularize the idea that 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.
Ametora, the Japanese slang abbreviation of "American traditional."
American clothing felt outmoded and jejune (Page 164)
Note: What is jejune?
. In 1983, twentysix-year-old Kyoto University assistant professor Akira Asada sold eighty thousand copies of his book Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics-the "first systematic introduction of certain strands in French philosophical thought, starting with a consideration of Lacan and Althusser, and then moving on to an account of Deleuze and Guattari." Not exactly light reading (Page 164)
engineer boots. (Page 168)
Note: What are engineer boots?
. Shibukaji was similar in nature to American Preppy-casual clothing worn by wealthy students naturally imbued with good taste. The teens' supreme selfconfidence, however, ended up convincing the status-obsessed nation that shibukaji was an even more moneyed look than the DC brands (Page 169)
moneyed nonchalance (Page 170)
Note: This is key
simply having the right brands without looking like you actually paid attention to the fashion world. The easy combination of classic American labels, loose-fitting clothing, and sneakers ultimately attracted more people into the apparel market than ever before. (Page 171)
idea for the label and found his concept after watching a TV marathon of the five Planet of the Apes films. He lifted the films' iconic simian faces for the logo and slapped on an English slogan-A Bathing Ape in Lukewater [sic]-borrowed from a line in an underground Takashi Nemoto comic that described an old man "like an ape in a bath of lukewarm water." Nigo whittled down the official brand name to the first three words-A Bathing Ape-and printed up a few T-shirts and jackets in the style of American vintage garments. (Page 179)
Goodenough never strayed from the scale of its founding days, and a decade after its launch, Fujiwara cut all personal ties to the label. Fujiwara made his own fortune on a collaboration with Japanese bag maker Yoshida Kaban, called Head Porter-a series of bags made from the same nylon as American MA-1 flight jackets. Head Porter became the de facto bag, wallet, and fanny pack brand for Ura-Harajuku fans, even with teens who had never heard of Goodenough or Hiroshi Fujiwara. When Head Porter became a national phenomenon, however, the perpetual lone wolf handed off management to a friend. Fujiwara told Theme in 2005, "I didn't really want lots of people working for me, whom I have to take care of. (Page 188)
"The famed traditional Levi's 501, Lee 200, and Wrangler 13MWZ have changed quite a bit in terms of quality. For example, they are economizing on the dyeing process and using cheaper open-end spinning. They successfully increased manufacturing efficiency but have seen a decrease in quality. More was lost than was gained."
But there was not much that Levi's, Lee, and Wrangler could do. From the 1950s on, American jeans makers faced ballooning worldwide demand, which necessitated faster and cheaper production. They worked with textile mills to move away from the slower ring-spun thread to the faster open-end spun variety. This fundamentally changed the way the material absorbed indigo dye. Mills also replaced their fleets of narrow, slow-moving Draper shuttle looms with high-tech projectile looms (Page 199)
Selvedge was a must, but buyers also looked for even older design elements, including real leather patches (used until the mid-1950s), hidden rivets only visible on the inside of the jeans (1937-1966), and a "big E" on the red Levi's logo tag (1936-1969). (Page 200)
"If you ask Japanese brands how they take care of their jeans, they kind of look at you in a funny way: We just wash them... in the washing machine." These stresses about washing denim suggest a peculiar historical reversal: Americans have become just as anxious about wearing their jeans "correctly" as the Japanese were about Western clothing in the 1960s. (Page 218)
This time, however, the industry did not just import the latest in American style; somehow, a Japanese ethos had infused America's "neo-trad." New York designer Thom Browne, with his Right Stuff haircut and cropped gray wool suit, personified the new wave of Americana in the Japanese press (Page 224)
Browne partially intended his aggressive suit silhouette-an extremely short jacket and show of ankle-to shock complacent American men out of sloppy dress. Popeye Editor-in-Chief Takahiro Kinoshita says, "I think Tom's great achievement is showing again how a guy in a suit could look cool." In the 1990s, the United States took on the ignoble distinction of being the First World's most casual country. For many men, dressing poorly became a badge of honor. Suit jackets slumped off the shoulders, and pant cuffs collected in a rippled muddle above the shoe. Ivy League students attended classes in stained sweatpants and flipflops. (Page 224)
Gentlemen looking to relearn the lost art of dressing up headed to Web forums Ask Andy and Styleforum to crowdsource expertise on hem lengths, jacket buttons, and necktie knots. And then Scott Schuman's photo blog "The Sartorialist" came along to provide daily visuals of stylish people on the streets of New York. Facing this knowledge vacuum, the early movers in online menswear media veered towards pedagogy over artistic exploration. 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. (Page 225)
In this menswear resurgence, America in 2008 uncannily resembled Japan in 1964. During both historical moments, a small autodidactic vanguard fought against social taboos around male interest in clothing (Page 225)
Valet's serious tutorials on garment care and suit fit are nearly identical to things Toshiyuki Kurosu wrote in Men's Club. And in a sense, "The Sartorialist"
is a contemporary version of "Ivy Leaguers on the Street." Of course, these Americans started their media ventures without ever seeing the 1960s Japanese originals, but their mission to evangelize fashion to a heathen population led them to the same methods of proselytization. (Page 225)
May 19, 2008 may be the exact date for that encounter the day when Michael Williams posted a few scans of Take Ivy on his site "A Continuous Lean." Men's fashion blogs were hunting for archival photos of classic collegiate styling and wardrobes, and Take Ivy was a dream come true: documentary evidence of how real American students used to dress in the glory days. The students' slim pants, tweed jackets, skinny ties, and crewneck sweaters perfectly matched the styling on modern blogs. A few months later, menswear blog "The Trad" posted scans of the entire Take Ivy volume. In a flash, the entire world could view the once unknown Japanese book online (Page 226)
When it was rereleased in Spring 2010, the once obscure VAN Jacket project was suddenly everywhere, selling more than fifty thousand copies. The influence went far beyond units moved.
Ralph Lauren and J.Crew stores used Take Ivy in their bookshelf displays. The Gap's one-time designer Rebekka Bay proudly showed her copy to Elle to explain her influences. Take Ivy even made Ivy League students rethink their own clothing: two stu dents at Dartmouth and Princeton founded a brand, Hillflint, just to re-create the graduation-year sweaters seen in the book. (Page 226)
In the twenty-first century, it is now conventional wisdom that the Japanese "do Americana better than Americans." Michael Williams of "A Continuous Lean" declared to his readers after a trip to Tokyo in 2009, "I stick to my belief that menswear in Japan is leaps and bounds ahead of what we get here in the States." (Page 228)
The most popular Japanese title in the U.S. among menswear enthusiasts was Free & Easy-a "Dad's Style" magazine devoted to "rugged" traditional American clothing for older men. (Page 230)
Toshiyuki Kurosu explains: "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." The Japanese at first shortened the words "American traditional" to Ametora, but now an entire set of Ametora practices stands as its own separate tradition.
So what makes Ametora distinct from the original? Both Japanese and foreign observers commonly point to a specific set of characteristics-ruledriven, studied, gender-normative, and high quality. Many assume these traits are extensions of the Japanese national character, but most of the quirks can be traced to the specific historical circumstances in which American style entered the country. (Page 231)
For example, why have the Japanese been so interested in fashionarguably far beyond other cultural fields? As Japanese teens built their own youth culture, they always prioritized fashion up over music, automobiles, furniture, and cuisine. Masayuki Yamazaki's Garage Paradise failed as a furniture shop but boomed as a clothing store, and there were always more faux oka fashion surfers than real surfers. 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.
United Arrows' founder and Honorary Chairman Osamu Shige1 explains, "Clothes have always had the highest return on investment because, unlike other kinds of culture, they're seen by others, and the Japanese care a lot about that. Clothes can express personal identity and also act as a communication tool." (Page 231)
American college students in the 1960s-whether Ivy-styled fraternity members or radical hippies-looked to their peers for clues on the "right" things to wear. No one needed to verbalize the rules. As fashion critic Shōzo Izuishi points out, "There's no 'Dictionary of Trad' in America, because you have older brothers, fathers, and grandfathers."
But to help Japanese teens start being stylish from scratch, VAN Jacket and Men's Club needed to take these unspoken precepts and turn them into explicit commandments. Kensuke Ishizu admitted in the 1980s, "When Ivy was introduced to Japan, we had to really drill the rules into people, because they had absolutely no knowledge about fashion. I am partly responsible for the fact that Ivy became taught in the style of 'You must do this." Ishizu's students, however, were not always cognizant of this alteration to Ivy culture; they just came to believe that rules were integral to the fashion experience.
Strict, rule-based fashion then incentivized followers to build up comprehensive knowledge (Page 232)
This all came crashing down in the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
As the public lost its appetite for vulgar displays of wealth, fashion editors needed something practical, something classic. As illustrator Kazuo Hozumi says, "If no one knows what is in style, they always come back to Ivy and Trad." (Page 233)
Japan has a base of production. Europe doesn't really have that. In Japan, you'll find someone with 200 yards of khaki twill and a factory that can make the material into pants, and they will be perfectly made." Japanese brands are able to prioritize high-quality garments, because, for the last seventy years, there have been craftsmen who can create those high-quality garments.
And consumers are willing to pay. (Page 233)
"Japanese people read magazines as their bibles, and when they see images in them they have to have them and will pay anything. Generally, Japanese people can't make up their own minds and have to have an example to follow. (Page 234)
this tendency towards organized mimicry is even seen among delinquent subcultures: the bōsōzoku started imitating Eikichi Yazawa from Carol, and, by the early 1990s, all wore identical right-winginspired tokköfuku uniforms. (Page 234)
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"). (Page 235)
"It's sad, but in Japan culture and fashion aren't linked. It's just floating above without any connection. Fashion is supposed to come from a lifestyle, but most Japanese don't try to understand that." Yasuhiko Kobayashi once compared Japanese fashion to "dress-up dolls"-systems of clothing put together for fun in a predictable way that can be put on and taken off without any deep meaning.
While these criticisms often ring true, this superficiality hearkens back to the fact that they are imported styles. By virtue of their foreign origin, any corresponding lifestyle must follow from the clothing rather than vice versa. Fashion thus became an expressive form of play in Japan. (Page 237)
Pointer Brand (Page 238)
Note: What is this?
Nakamura started a shoe line in 2002 that fused high-tech American sneakers with Native American moccasins. As he expanded visvim into a full clothing line, he became the Indiana Jones of the apparel world, uncovering heavy wool coats in Tibet, reindeer-skin boots from Norway's Sami tribe, colorful folk art in Guatemalan villages, hand-dye blankets on Navajo reservations, and kudu pelts in Africa. He incorporated these elements not just as visual design but studied age-old techniques to pick up clues on bolstering functionality.
Visvim customers do not just pay for the high costs of premium materials, but for the "story" sewn into every product (Page 238)
selvedge jeans to loopwheeled sweatshirts and button-down oxford cloth shirts (Page 243)
Instead you would go to Japan's Tailor Caid." The man behind Caid, Yuhei Yamamoto, fell in love with the "clean and sharp" look of American men in early 1960s TV shows such as Bewitched. Unable to get his hands on similar suits in Tokyo, he embarked on a twelve-year apprenticeship with the legendary Boston Tailor, which had once outfitted U.S. military officers on the Yokota Air Base. Yamamoto now suits up a steady cohort of Japanese trad fans, as well as foreign devotees such as musician Nick Waterhouse. Beyond Caid's olive-green chino suits and navy doublebreasted "Newport jackets," Yamamoto's bespoke shirts breathe new life into nearly moribund Ivy details, including a wider box pleat, back-collar buttons, and a perfect collar roll. Caid's frequent trunk shows at menswear boutique The Armoury in Tribeca allow Yamamoto to outfit young New Yorkers like New Yorkers of yore. (Page 245)
Rocky Mountain Featherbed.
Topwin, a company run by Japanese men in Torrance, California, resurrected the defunct Cincinnati sportswear line, Velva Sheen, to manufacture a line of basic T-shirts. (Page 246)
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. (Page 253)
Tyler Brûlé of Monocle has spoken of Japan as a place that retains what other countries have lost: "Japan has somehow held on to, not just Japanese traditions, but everything that happened in the postwar period.... You still feel like you're walking onto a stage set. Everything is done exquisitely and perfectly."
The consumers are getting older. People don't need so much product. They want to have something that has meaning and lasts long