Faites la mode, pas la guerre (culturelle)

Evisu’s trick was to use Oriental design motifs to position its jeans as more authentic than modern American jeans. Their jeans told a story of superior Japanese craftsmen working hard to make the things that Americans could no longer make themselves. The press in the late 1990s invariably reported that Yamane bought up old “Levi’s looms” thrown away in the American brand’s mindless pursuit of efficiency and profit. This was untrue in multiple ways: Levi’s never owned looms, Cone Mills’ older Draper looms were sold off for scrap rather than to the Japanese, and Japanese denim mills already owned higher-quality Toyoda selvedge looms. Nevertheless, the myth persisted because the story sounded logical for a Japanese denim company sparing no expense in re-creating vintage details.

While American fashion affected the clothing styles of both sexes in Japan, the United States’ influence on menswear has been both greater and more constant. Since the shedding of the kimono in the postwar period, Japanese womenswear has moved to the metronome of European designer collections. Japanese men, on the other hand, only came to accept fashion as an acceptable pursuit through a growing interest in elite campus wardrobes, rugged outdoorsmanship, (sub)cultural identity, and imitations of Hollywood stars—all of which led them to America’s more casual, lifestyle-grounded styles. While London’s Savile Row gave Japan its basic model for prewar male dress, after 1945 the raiment of the New World offered a much more compelling vision.

Today, most baby boomers remember VAN fondly as their introduction to both personal style and an Americanized lifestyle. In teaching the entire “Ivy” milieu, VAN employees imbued youth with aspirations and dreams that reached beyond clothing into music, hobbies, automobiles, and food. With traditional Japanese culture discredited by their defeat in WWII, youth were desperate for a new set of values. And at just the right time, VAN offered up an idealized version of American life. 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.”

On a more basic level, Ivy looked staid set against the era’s turmoil. After years of symbolizing teenage delinquency, Ivy had come to represent conventional fashion. As Yoshio Sadasue explains, “Ivy ultimately became ‘PTA fashion’ because it was the clothes that your father and mother would be most relieved to see you wearing.” Even the men who brought Ivy to Japan rethought their affiliation with the style. Toshiyuki Kurosu once said, “When I started wearing Ivy, it was the clothes of the antiestablishment. But then America—the model for Ivy—went bad, and I could no longer hide my disappointment.”

Maruo Clothing originally hoped that teens would buy blue jeans along with cotton chinos in their embrace of America, but by the end of the 1960s, teens looked to jeans as the most powerful antidote to Ivy style. Ironically, Japanese youth’s act of rebellion against American hegemony involved wearing the most iconic piece of American clothing ever. Despite this obvious hypocrisy, no one dared return to traditional Japanese clothing, and the industry had positioned European clothing as even more elegant and bourgeois than East Coast fashion. By the late 1960s, Japanese society offered only two extreme poles of youth fashion—from buttoned-up Ivy to shaggy hippie—and classic American items fleshed out the style on both sides.

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 wind-breakers 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.”

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. 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.

Many of the Popeye editors, however, remained skeptical of the United States. Staff writer Takashi Matsuyama admitted, “I was not especially interested in America. It’s probably the country I hate most.” Members of this generation often explain that they love “American culture,” but hate “the American state.” VAN’s Paul Hasegawa elaborates on this feeling, “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.”

Where cultural icons of the past rose to fame on the power of their own creations, Fujiwara and his young pupils found success in the act of curation—choosing the best music, fashion, books, and consumer goods for magazines. Japanese media knew how to find trends on East Coast campuses and Parisian runways, but editors struggled in the mid-1980s to keep up with the rise of street culture. The knowledgeable, connected Fujiwara was the answer to all of their problems. But for Fujiwara to leave a lasting mark on culture, he would need to become more than a cultural clearinghouse. He and his crew needed to make something of their own.

By any measure, the most successful brand to come out of the VAN Jacket family is the $36 billion, global apparel giant Fast Retailing. Its marquee chain, UNIQLO, has over fifteen hundred stores in eighteen countries, and is on the verge of $15 billion in yearly revenue. Founder Tadashi Yanai is often ranked as Japan’s richest person. His father ran a small VAN franchisee called Ogri Shji in the industrial town of Ube, Yamaguchi, which Ishizu renamed “Men’s Shop OS” to attract a younger crowd. Sadasue remembers, “Yanai knows VAN and Ivy really well. And when VAN went belly up, Yanai realized that he couldn’t keep Men’s Shop OS like it was.”

Take Ivy revealed the degree to which Japan’s deep interest in American style kept the knowledge alive while Americans spent decades rejecting their own legacy of dress. Few Americans in the 1960s thought to take pictures of college students any more than they would take pictures of hamburgers, highways, or oak trees. On the other hand, the Japanese—in their examination of Ivy League style as an alien culture—needed reference materials and photographic evidence. Years later, when fashion brands like The Gap, J. Crew, and Ralph Lauren foraged for authentic historical records, they discovered the Japanese documentary material as the best source for photos of student clothing from Trad’s golden years.

From the widest perspective, Japanese fashion certainly shows that cultural behavior is not an expression of eternal national characteristics passed down from generation to generation in an unbroken line. American fashion came to Japan in the hands of social misfits hungry for change and business success. It then blended with local customs and practices. The ecosystem was always changing, moving, and adapting—and going forward, we should expect the same thing to happen. The Ametora tradition will not stand still, but will continue to be shaped by the passage of time.

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”).