Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

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With plenty of great anecdotes and delightful digressions, ‘Jeans’ tells the story of how jeans have been part of American history for 150 years, and how they became an iconic symbol of America around the world. The care about culture involved in the Japanese process resonates with thinking men,” says Russell Cameron of Kafka Mercantile. “Less is more, proper fabrics, proper manufacturing, striving to produce the authentic. I genuinely feel that the quest is to make the best or make the best better.”

These cleanup efforts proceeded steadily until August, when the switchboards at Tsukiji Police Station began lighting up with frantic phone calls. Ginza shop owners reported an infestation on the main promenade, Miyuki-dori, requiring immediate assistance from law enforcement: There were hundreds of Japanese teenagers hanging around in strange clothing ! In the book, you introduce [the book] Take Ivy as one of the first major influences on Japanese style. Amekaji” is the term used to describe American casual style, specifically “Ametora” refers to the American Traditional fashion style in Japan. There are two questions here – why did American and British styles come to Japan and then why did Japanese youth adopt them? In Ametora, I show that the growth of Western fashion in Japan was not exactly organic – brands made a very conscious effort to import the latest in American and British youth styles as a business venture. And then once the styles caught on, mostly with help from the consumer media, there was an entire industrial-media complex looking for the latest in Western trends and offering versions to young people, whether domestically made or imported.The mashed-up, anything goes aesthetic favoured by Korea’s zeitgeist-y pop stars, who espouse a similarly genre-agnostic approach to music, is less a look and more a mindset. More is more, trends are fleeting but to be embraced wholesale, individuality is all, although ideally in a way that shows you get groupthink. In the mix here there’s preppy fashion, unstructured tailoring, big-brand streetwear and some ’80s denim for good measure. The only flaw is, as I said, the subtitle doesn't really apply. The last chapter is about Americans looking to Japan's sense of style as a guide for how to be fashionable, and about finding old copies of Ivy Tribe and using them as a sartorial guide, but I would have preferred at least a couple chapters about it. Most of the book is historical, and I would liked a bit more of a modern focus.

And we’re not talking about Uniqlo. The cult of Japanese menswear centres more on a nerdy, expensive strain of men’s fashion. It’s stuff for the purists: painstakingly made clothes that have been in style since at least the 1950s, more often than not classic American designs reimagined and often bettered. They call it Ametora. Additionally, Marx writes about the impact on the creation of streetwear such as BAPE and Japanese avant-garde brands such as Comme des Garcons (Junya Watanabe), Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and others managed to evoke on the Western fashion consciousness, representing a genuine two-way communication in style. He connects this to the explosion of Harajuku as THE most dynamic fashion location in the world ... a change that happened practically overnight. He loved American culture- especially jazz and Hawaiian music....but he despised the United State's military presence across Asia...We were leading completely contradictory lives." p.99 But Japan’s love of Americana is well-documented—and taken alone, does not constitute a special relationship. The turning point between the two, however, occured in the ‘90s. By then, Japanese Americana brands had become as good as—if not better than—their American counterparts. More importantly, though, there was a nascent subversive subculture emerging in Tokyo. Ura-Harajuku, in particular, became an epicentre of Japan’s streetwear scene. It was there that the foundations for brands like A Bathing Ape, WTAPS, Undercover, GOODENOUGH, Hysteric Glamour, Cav Empt and Head Porter were laid. Other creatives, like Sasquatchfabrix’s designer Daisuke Yokoyama, were launching freepapers, manifestos of sort for graffiti and post-punk subcultures that were inspired by what was happening in America. While buoyed by a vibrant creative scene in Tokyo and predominantly inspired by local subcultures, most of the aforementioned brands considered elements of Americana crucial to their overall aesthetic, whether they be military garb (WTAPS), motorcycle culture (Neighborhood) or punk (Undercover). Ivy (abbii) was the first American fashion that came into Japan. However, their understanding of American culture was limited. Thus they copy precisely to the point (versus in America style was mostly inherited without precise rules). Such trend continues as Japan then copied Preppy, 50s, Greasers/James Dean (Yankii) fashion styleFurthermore, Ametora today is part of Japanese culture. People in Japan wear these styles of clothing because their fathers and brothers wore it, their media advocates it, Japanese brands make it and Japanese celebrities wear it – not because they’re told it’s what to wear to be like an American. The most enjoyable part of the book, aside from the overall context, is the collection of niche anecdotes related to the people and trends that shaped how Japanese menswear has evolved. I imagine Marx unearthed these from interviews and the extensive sources list he included in the book, but they really add color to the facts. But why ? How can we explain the prominent role Japan is playing in the global sartorial movement ? After the Second World War a majority of the Japanese wanted nothing to do with the militaristic ‘Japanese’ culture that emerged during wartime. In the case of fashion, there was nothing really ‘Japanese’ for men in the post-war era to start with. Adult men wore really boxy, vaguely-British style suits with no glamour. American youth style did not appear and replace Japanese style. It replaced nothing.