Ametora:
How Japan Saved American Style
BY TIM HORNYAK
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN
TIMES
DEC 5, 2015
Tokyo, September
1964: A squad of plainclothes police descend on the tony Ginza
shopping district and round up hundreds of Japanese youths who had
outraged local businesses. Their crime? Loitering in what was then
outre style — button-down shirts, skinny ties, suit jackets and
chino pants. These delinquents were the miyuki-zoku (Miyuki tribe)
and they idolized one thing: Ivy League fashion.
Ametora:
How Japan Saved American Style, by W. David Marx
296
pages
Basic
Books, Nonfiction.
Yes, they were
preppies. Tokyo was about to host the Olympics and these kids were
causing alarm by rejecting their 19th-century gakuran (high-collar)
school uniforms. The Ginza panic seems incomprehensible today, but
this is one of the fascinating accounts in W. David Marx’s unique
archeology of Japanese menswear fashion, “Ametora.” The term is
Japanese shorthand for “American traditional” and the book traces
the cultural history of American trad as well as jeans and streetwear
in Japan — how they were imported, exploited and sometimes
radically modified. The result is, as Marx observes, “a highly
illustrative episode of how culture globalizes.”
From gyaru (gals) to
French maids, Tokyo’s wild vogues have caught international
attention over the past decade or so and there could be no better
guide to hacking one’s way to the source of this fashion Amazon
than Marx, a Tokyo-based Harvard grad who has long blogged about
style at Neojaponisme.com. According to Marx, the adoption of
American styles in Japan began with one man, Kensuke Ishizu
(1911-2005). The Okayama-born founder of clothing company Van Jacket
is most known for “Take Ivy,” the 1965 photo book he commissioned
of American students walking about on prestigious Ivy League
campuses, decked out in letterman sweaters, sports jackets, madras
shorts and penny loafers. In addition to this bible for the East
Coast collegiate look in Japan, Ishizu also stoked youth interest —
and clothing sales — via a magazine called Men’s Club. It
enumerated in excruciating detail the finer points of dressing Ivy.
Neckties had to be precisely 7 cm wide, but slanted jacket pockets
were a no-no “anti-Ivy technique.”
Aping looks from the
United States wasn’t without its ridiculous moments. Men’s Club
featured a 1959 photo of wannabe Ivy Leaguers looking more like
businessmen in porkpie hats than big men on campus. When enthusiast
Toshiyuki Kurosu and other Take Ivy authors snuck into Harvard to do
research and take photos, they expected to see students in
three-button jackets, regimental ties and wingtips — instead they
were in cutoff shorts and flip flops.
“This was people
having to adopt a completely foreign culture from zero and then
actually sell it to other people as a package,” Marx says over a
beer in Shibuya. “They were trying to sell to kids who had no
clothing whatsoever other than their school uniforms.”
Marx first became
interested in Japanese style after experiencing the streetwear craze
in Tokyo in the late 1990s. He was so shocked to have to wait three
hours in line to buy a T-shirt at A Bathing Ape that he later wrote
his thesis on the chain, which is also chronicled in “Ametora.”
It was a chance encounter with a former Van employee years later
(while getting his cordovan oxfords polished, of course) that opened
up introductions to the surviving Take Ivy pioneers.
“There was
absolutely no culture of fashion when I was at Harvard,” Marx says.
“People have this image of it as this place where people still
dress like the ’60s. You’re lucky if people are wearing clean
T-shirts with their sweatpants.”
Gaps in
understanding didn’t dent the success of the Ivy look in Japan as
Van sparked a revolution in Japanese menswear toward a more casual,
individualistic aesthetic. Van enjoyed tremendous success until its
bankruptcy in 1978, but countless styles sprung up in its wake:
surfers, hippies, rockabilly greasers and bosozoku (biker gangs), not
to mention offshoots like the takenoko-zoku (bamboo shoot tribe), who
loved to dance in public in garish kung-fu outfits.
Indeed,
entrepreneurs like Masayuki Yamazaki made a mint in doing exactly the
opposite of Ivy — preaching ’50s hoodlum styles (sometimes called
yankii) and putting a Tokyo backwater district called Harajuku on the
map with his vintage shop Cream Soda, which counted John Lennon among
its customers. As Marx writes, the retro rockers weren’t just
imitating foreigners: “They used American influences to terrorize
the public — regent haircuts, Hawaiian shirts, dirty jeans — but
abandoned them when right-wing garb offered greater potency.”
Probably Ishizu’s
greatest legacy today is the global success of Fast Retailing, the
clothing firm behind the Uniqlo casual wear chain. Founder Tadashi
Yanai’s father ran a Van franchise in Yamaguchi Prefecture and some
of Van’s dedication to selling cheap, smart-looking clothes can be
found in the Uniqlo ethos. Fast Retailing represents in a sense the
full flowering of ametora. Also significant is the recent passion for
Ivy style by fashion-conscious Americans tired of rampant casual
wear. Style blogs in the U.S. began posting scans of Take Ivy in
2008, and when it was published in English in 2010, it sold over
50,000 copies, also appearing in Ralph Lauren and J. Crew outlets.
Americans were turning to Japan to rediscover what they had lost, and
the ironic circle was complete.
Sartorially savvy
and rigorously researched, “Ametora” is a smart account of
Japan’s engagement with America through the lens of menswear. Even
if you don’t know your brothel creepers from your brogues, this
book is a pleasure to read and an essential manual for decoding
contemporary Japanese culture.
 |
W. David Marx, a
writer based in Tokyo, is the founder and editor of néojaponisme.com.
He is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, from
which this essay is excerpted. Available from Basic Books, a member
of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.
|
 |
On May 24, 2005,
VAN Jacket founder Kensuke Ishizu died at the age of ninety-three. By
then millions of Japanese men—students, employees, executives, and
retirees—were following Ishizu’s principles of Ivy as their basic
style. Ishizu taught the 1960s generation how to dress, and they
passed down those sartorial lessons to their children.
|
The
Climb of Ivy
The
styles of the American Ivy League transform the fashions of 1960s
Japan.
By W. David Marx
0n April 28, 1964, a
new magazine called Heibon Punch appeared on Japanese newsstands. The
cover illustration showed four boys dressed in the style of American
Ivy League students—blazers, short cotton pants, loafers, sharply
parted Kennedy haircuts—chatting to another boy in a red sports
car. Punch’s pages taught teens how to dress in this so-called Ivy
style.
Heibon Punch was an
immediate success. The debut issue sold 620,000 copies, and within
two years circulation hit one million. The first wave of Japan’s
postwar baby boom was entering college right as it launched. Compared
with the frugal youth who came of age immediately after World War II,
the baby boomers wanted to play in Japan’s newly emerging consumer
society and could afford to. Heibon Punch became their guide.
The excitement
around Punch sent young men to the most famous retailer for Ivy
fashion: the clothing company VAN Jacket’s flagship store, Teijin
Men’s Shop, in the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo. There they bought
their own button-down shirts, madras blazers, cotton chino pants, and
penny loafers. Soon teenagers in these clothes started to park
themselves on Miyuki Street and stay all day. They became infamous in
the press as the Miyuki Tribe (miyuki-zoku).
The term zoku means
“tribe” in Japanese, but the postwar usage connoted a delinquent
subculture. Before 1964 a few youth tribes invented unique styles but
almost always as an organic extension of their lifestyle. The Thunder
Tribe (kaminari-zoku) bikers dressed in leather proper for a
motorcycle ride, while the Sun Tribe (taiyō-zoku) partied on the
beaches in bright coastal clothing. The Miyuki Tribe, by contrast,
learned to dress directly from the mass media—a youth brigade
drafted straight from the models in Heibon Punch.
Parents did not
approve of their sons wearing stylish American clothing, so young men
snuck out to Ginza with their Ivy duds hidden in rolled-up paper
bags, then changed in cafe bathrooms. The paper shopping bag became a
vehicle for VAN to promote its brand. The company had started
providing the sleek paper bags to retailers featuring its logo in a
red box at the bottom that stretched around the side. These bags
flooded the streets, and young shoppers came to fetishize the logo.
Youth who could not afford to buy anything from an official VAN
retailer carried around an old rice bag with a VAN sticker on top.
As the summer of
1964 progressed and schools let out for vacation, teens swelled the
Miyuki Tribe’s ranks, ballooning to two thousand members each
weekend. The Olympics were being hosted that year in Tokyo, and the
media demonized the Miyuki Tribe as a national embarrassment. Even
teens who liked Ivy style pleaded for distance from the Miyuki fad. A
sixteen-year-old high-school student in Ginza told reporters, “We
hate being called members of the Miyuki Tribe—we’re Ivy.”
Parents moved to ban
Ivy style at schools. Parent-teacher associations sent formal
requests to VAN retailers to stop selling to students. In many small
towns, schools prohibited teens from carrying a VAN bag or entering
shops that sold the brand. But young men defied orders and lined up
outside of menswear shops just to grab discarded cardboard boxes with
the brand’s logo. A few maverick companies, meanwhile, got in on
the action. Home-electronics company Sanyo worked with VAN to create
a line of gadgets—the Sanyo Ivy Razor, the Sanyo Ivy Dryer, and the
Sanyo Ivy Junior Tape Recorder. The word Ivy, after years of work by
promoters in Japan, was synonymous with cool.
The beginning of the
widespread adoption of American style in Japan can be traced back to
a single individual, Kensuke Ishizu, founder of VAN Jacket and father
of Japan’s Ivy style. Ishizu was born in the southwestern city of
Okayama in 1911. It was the end of the Meiji era, a period that
marked Japan’s transition from feudal society to modern
nation-state.
The Meiji era began
in 1868. For the previous 265 years the Tokugawa military government
had enforced a sakoku, or “closed country” policy, to isolate
Japan from the rest of the world. This seclusion came to an end in
1854 when U.S. naval commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of
warships demanded the country open its borders to trade. Four years
later the shogunate signed a series of treaties with Western powers
that threw Japan into economic and cultural chaos. Determined to get
the nation back on track, reform-minded samurai took control of the
government in 1868 under the banner of Emperor Meiji. During this
so-called Meiji Restoration, the country’s leaders worked to adopt
Western technologies and lifestyles, believing that a more modern
Japan could fight off additional American and European attempts at
colonization.
Before the Meiji
era, members of Japan’s high-ranking samurai caste wore their long
hair in topknots, strolled dirt roads in robes, and demonstrated
their status with two swords tucked into their belts. By the first
decade of the twentieth century, the country’s rulers attended
bureaucratic meetings, banquets, and gala balls in three-piece suits
and Napoleonic military uniforms. Imported clothing styles became a
source of prestige.
Even before Western
fashion supplanted traditional costumes, Japanese society had long
used clothing as an important marker of status and position. To
maintain social order, the Tokugawa military government, which began
in 1603, micromanaged the nation’s vestments, regulating materials
and patterns to certain castes. Only the nobles and samurai—a mere
10 percent of the population—were permitted to wear silk. But not
everyone followed these rules. When farmers and urban merchants began
to accumulate more wealth than their samurai betters, they lined
their standard cotton robes with silk in an act of subversive
panache.
After 1868 the Meiji
government moved men into practical Western dress. In 1870 the
emperor cut his hair short and donned a European-inspired military
uniform. A year later, the Haircut Edict instructed all former
samurai to lop off their topknots. The military adopted Western
uniforms, with the navy imitating the British and the army imitating
the French. In 1885 Tokyo’s Imperial University put its pupils in
black gakuran (or tsume-eri), closed square-collar jackets and
matching pants. The enduring symbol of the early Meiji era was the
Rokumeikan—a French Renaissance–styled hall where Japanese
elites dressed in formal ensembles, danced the waltz, and mingled
with wealthy foreigners. From the 1890s onward, urban white-collar
workers wore British-style suits to work.
Kensuke Ishizu’s
childhood coincided with the subsequent Taishō era, when the growing
middle classes were joining elites in adopting Western customs. By
the time Ishizu was in his teens in the 1920s, Japan was undergoing
rapid changes in social mores. The notorious mobo and moga—“modern
boys” and “modern girls”—stood at the vanguard. After the
devastating 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, many Japanese women adopted
Western dress for better disaster preparedness. Moga, by contrast,
played with Western culture as style—wearing silky dresses with
short bobs. Their mobo beaus slicked back long hair and wore flared
wide-leg “trumpet pants.” Every weekend, mobo and moga flocked to
Tokyo’s lavish Ginza neighborhood and strolled its well-lit brick
streets. These youth liberated style leadership from the upper
classes and took it in unauthorized directions.
In 1929 Ishizu moved
to Tokyo to attend Meiji University. He rejected the utilitarian
gakuran school uniform and instead ordered a three-piece suit in
brown-green tweed—at the cost of half a professor’s monthly
salary—matching it with white-and-brown saddle shoes.
The mobo/moga moment
would be short-lived: worried about the rise in leftist radicals, the
government reversed course on liberalization in the early 1930s.
Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department launched a campaign to clean
up juvenile delinquency, pledging to close every dance hall in the
city. Law enforcement swept the streets of Ginza for overly
fashionable youth. The police arrested anyone doing anything
suspiciously modern—going to cinemas, drinking coffee, or eating
grilled sweet potatoes on the street. Regardless, in March 1932
Ishizu was married in a high-collar morning coat and a custom-ordered
ascot.
In mid-1939 Ishizu,
now twenty-eight, left with his family for the Chinese port city of
Tianjin to become sales director at a department store, soon taking
over clothing manufacture and design. Tianjin, situated on the East
China Sea, hosted a diverse group of nationalities. Ishizu frequented
British tailors to learn trade secrets, heard war news at the local
Jewish club, and bet on jai alai in the Italian concession.
After the attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese government systematically
rolled back all Western influences from local culture. The public
heard daily propaganda about the savage crimes of the “devilish
Anglo-Americans.” New regulations demanded that companies remove
English words from brand names and advised against writing words
horizontally. While Ishizu wore his high-end three-piece suits,
Japanese men back in Okayama lived in practical, khaki-colored
uniforms called “citizen clothing” (kokuminfuku)—an early
parallel to Communist China’s Mao suit.
In August 1945,
while serving as a naval attaché in Tianjin, Ishizu heard the
emperor’s radio broadcast announcing the Japanese surrender to
Allied Forces. The Nationalist Chinese prevented any mass violence
against the former occupiers, but they ransacked the glycerin factory
where he had been assigned during the war. Ishizu spent most of
September 1945 locked in a former Japanese naval library.
In October the U.S.
First Marine Division arrived, coming ashore to an impromptu victory
parade. Looking for Japanese men who could speak English, a young
American lieutenant broke Ishizu out of the library. Ishizu and the
lieutenant became friends, the American regaling Ishizu with stories
of his undergraduate life at Princeton. Ishizu heard for the first
time about something called the “Ivy League.”
On March 15, 1946,
the Americans put Ishizu and his family on a cargo ship back to
Japan. He took only a backpack, leaving behind the modern equivalent
of $27 million in cash. At the end of March 1946, Kensuke Ishizu
returned to his hometown of Okayama, which was completely burned to
the ground.
Ishizu became the
menswear designer for a high-end clothing showroom in Osaka. The late
1940s was an odd time to manufacture expensive menswear. Japanese
spent forty times more on food than on clothing. Women continued to
wear the baggy, high-waisted monpe farming pants they wore during
wartime. Pilots who had been in line to perform kamikaze missions
wandered around in brown flight suits.
In this fashion
vacuum of garment shortages and rationing, the first group in Japan
to readopt Western style were the Pan Pan Girls—streetwalking
prostitutes who catered to American soldiers. They wore brightly
colored American dresses and platform heels, with a signature
kerchief tied around their necks. They permed their hair, caked on
heavy makeup, and wore red lipstick and red nail polish. Pan Pan
Girls’ jackets had enormous shoulder pads in imitation of officers’
wives. Prewar Western fashion and customs had entered society through
the male elite and trickled down. But the first to wear
American-style clothing in postwar Japan were women—and prostitutes
at that.
Following the
American way of life looked like a way out of despair. Prewar
interest in Western culture was an aesthetic choice and status
symbol—now it was also a means of self-preservation. Kensuke Ishizu
had a business advantage in this new Japan where everyone hoped to
imitate American lifestyles. He built up a network of the top sewing
talent in Osaka and stockpiled fabrics and zippers through an
American soldier who shopped for him at the post exchange. Ishizu
turned out top-notch garments that got the attention of not just
others in the garment industry but also law enforcement. His product
was so good that the police apprehended him for a short time on
suspicion that he was illegally importing clothing from abroad.
At the end of 1949,
Ishizu started his own business, Ishizu Shōten (“Ishizu Store”).
Although still few in Japan could afford to buy new clothing, Ishizu
was confident that the market would return.
Proximity to the
Korean Peninsula made Japan a key manufacturing base for the American
military effort after the Korean War began in 1950. These boom times
encouraged the urban middle classes to finally revamp their
wardrobes. Ishizu pursued an alternate business model to the
traditional practice of made-to-order suiting: ready-to-wear
clothing. Tailoring was expensive and time-consuming (one suit cost a
month’s salary), whereas off-the-rack clothing could get a larger
volume of garments to an eager public. Ishizu pumped out saddle shoes
as well as cotton flannel shirts and indigo work pants under a faux
American brand called Kentucky.
Ishizu Shōten found
its most profitable niche, however, in high-end sport coats for rich
elites. An Osaka department store gave Ishizu Shōten its own corner,
and Ishizu found a loyal customer base in wealthy suburban families.
As the business grew, Ishizu wanted a more memorable brand name, so
he rechristened his company VAN Jacket, borrowing VAN from the title
of a comic book.
A major barrier
remained: it was taboo for men to show interest in fashion. When
white-collar workers first donned Western suits in the early
twentieth century, the garment was meant as a modern and sober
uniform, not as a means of self-expression. Any tweaks or
customization to the basic formula implied vanity. If the suit’s
wool looked rough, a tailor would turn the fabric inside out and sew
it back together. The basic male wardrobe went to extremes of
conformity: a single charcoal-gray or navy-blue suit, dark tie, white
shirt, and dark shoes. White shirts outsold colored ones more than
twenty to one. A striped shirt was enough to get a worker in trouble.
And ready-to-wear clothing was not an option. Men dismissed
nontailored garments as tsurushi or tsurushinbo, meaning “something
hung up,” with the sting of a racial slur.
Japanese women in
the early 1950s could enjoy a handful of fashion magazines, but they
were utilitarian—pages packed full of black-and-white dress
patterns rather than dream catalogues full of glossy photos. Men had
only one fashion resource: the suit-pattern guide Danshi Senka. In
early 1954 female readers of women’s magazine Fujin Gahō, who
reveled in the latest Parisian styles, complained that their husbands
accompanied them to parties and weddings in bland business suits. The
Fujingahōsha publishing company decided that men needed a fashion
magazine to teach them proper dress, and they wanted a charismatic
figure to make the magazine compelling. One name kept popping up:
Kensuke Ishizu.
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 semiformal wear, business
wear, sportswear, and golf wear. Ishizu and the other writers gave
practical advice to fashion novices and introduced the latest styles
from America, France, and England.
Ishizu turned Otoko
no Fukushoku into a VAN media organ, weaving advertisements and
clothing samples from his company throughout the magazine and buying
up the majority of each 35,000-issue print run to sell them to VAN’s
retailers. He wrote so much for the first few years that he had to
hide his work under pen names such as Esu Kaiya (“Esquire”) in
fear that his authorship was too conspicuous.
In the mid-1950s
the few young men who rejected their school uniforms for stylish
clothing were marginalized as delinquents. Youth wore uniforms
everywhere; there was no such thing as “young fashion.” Parents
in the postwar era felt a particular anxiety about their children
wearing fashionable clothing. The strict morality of the imperialist
era collapsed after World War II in tandem with the wartime regime,
and parents assumed their children would go astray in the ensuing
moral vacuum.
The sensational “Oh,
Mistake Incident” of 1950 solidified these associations. Hiroyuki
Yamagiwa, a nineteen-year-old chauffeur at Nihon University, broke
into a coworker’s car at knifepoint, slashed the driver, and drove
off with 1.9 million yen in cash. Yamagiwa then took his girlfriend
on a three-day joyride. The minor crime made headlines after Yamagiwa
screamed out in pidgin English “Oh, mistake!” upon being
apprehended. During police interrogation Yamagiwa continued to drop
random English words into his Japanese and revealed a tattoo that
said “George.” In just three days on the lam Yamagiwa and his
girlfriend spent 100,000 yen—ten times a university graduate’s
starting monthly salary—on clothing in high-end Ginza boutiques. In
front of the media flashbulbs Yamagiwa wore a gold corduroy jacket,
red pocket square, dark brown gabardine pants, light brown button-up
shirt with long collar points, argyle socks, chocolate brown shoes,
and a President Truman–style fedora. For disapproving adults across
Japan, the connection between loose morals and American fashion could
not have been any clearer.
Things slowly
started to change. In 1956 the Japanese government released a white
paper on the economy that opened with a joyous phrase—mohaya sengo
de wa nai, “the postwar is over.” The population had enough food,
work, and shelter; they began to think more about what to wear. But
middle-aged men continued to deplore off-the-rack clothing, and
Ishizu resigned himself to the fact that it would never appeal to his
own generation. Against the mores of the period, he would have to
court the youth market.
None of the
contemporary trends in Japan looked right for the new line of
ready-to-wear clothing Ishizu wanted to make for younger men. Looking
for inspiration, Ishizu embarked on a world tour in December 1959,
culminating in his first visit to the United States. While in New
York Ishizu sought out a popular American fashion style often covered
in Otoko no Fukushoku’s international reporting—“Ivy League.”
By the late 1950s the look had moved beyond campuses and into the
mainstream of American wardrobes.
Ishizu took the
train down to Princeton, the alma mater of his American lieutenant
friend. Japan’s elite campuses were packed with identical-looking
boys in black wool uniforms; Ishizu was impressed by Ivy League
students, who dressed up for classes in a distinct, individual way.
The shots he snapped with his compact camera of Princeton
undergraduates later illustrated his U.S. trip report for Otoko no
Fukushoku. One attractive Ivy Leaguer in a blazer, undone dark
necktie, white button-down shirt, gray flannel pants, and a coat
slung over his shoulder became the issue’s unwitting cover model.
As Ishizu wrote in an accompanying essay, “There was nothing like
that particular American flamboyance that we all have come to
expect.”
These elite,
athletic students demonstrated how dapper a young man could look in
ready-to-wear clothing. The clothes looked neat and fit closely to
the body. Ishizu especially liked that the style relied on natural
materials such as cotton and wool, which could be worn for a long
time and easily cleaned. 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.
Ishizu now had his
inspiration. In 1959 VAN produced its first “Ivy model” suit—a
detailed copy of Brooks Brothers’ classic Number One Sack Suit with
a loose, dartless jacket.
Ishizu’s imported
style found ready acolytes. Two particularly dedicated readers of
Otoko no Fukushoku, Kazuo Hozumi and Toshiyuki Kurosu, founded the
Traditional Ivy Leaguers Club with five other friends in the late
1950s. The group held weekly seminars on Ivy style, looking up terms
from American magazines in a yellowed prewar English clothing
encyclopedia. They also invited an aging tailor to teach them about
details associated with the American style, such as hooked vents (a
key part of the stitching on the back of a blazer) and overlapped
seams.
In 1959 the club
convinced Otoko no Fukushoku—which Ishizu had newly rebranded with
the English name Men’s Club—to feature them in a four-page story.
All seven members appeared in dark Ivy suits for the group portrait,
holding up a poster of a blond pinup girl to demonstrate their
expertise in American culture. A blurb proclaimed them to be “seven
Ivy samurai.”
Today, little about
the clothing in the photo would be identified as Ivy League
style—certainly not Kurosu’s porkpie hat, cufflinks,
silver-colored formal necktie, and pearl tiepin. Despite Men’s
Club’s position at the forefront of Ivy League fashion in Japan,
nobody involved in the operation could accurately replicate the
American collegiate look. Lacking firsthand experience with Ivy
League students, the style in Japan was built on tiny scraps of
information and Men’s Club editors’ educated guesses.
In 1961 Kensuke
Ishizu hired his son Shōsuke, who had been working at Men’s Club,
to be the head of VAN’s planning department and produce an Ivy
clothing line. Before this point, most Ivy items relied on the
fifty-year-old’s imagination: Ishizu called shirts with a long
vertical stripe “Ivy shirts,” desert boots with a buckle on the
back “Ivy boots,” and pants with a buckle on the back “Ivy
pants” with an “Ivy strap.” Shōsuke’s mission was to make
more authentic Ivy items, but he did not know how. The obvious
solution was to bring in an Ivy expert. Toshiyuki Kurosu, cofounder
of the Traditional Ivy Leaguers Club, was invited to join VAN and
accepted the offer.
At the beginning,
the two young employees struggled with even the core pieces.
With no connections to Ivy League colleges or university shops,
Kurosu and Shōsuke had few concrete details on the latest campus
fashions. They foraged for hints in GQ, Esquire, Men’s Wear, Sports
Illustrated, the French magazine Adam, JC Penney and Sears Roebuck
catalogs, and the ads in The New Yorker. These publications provided
design ideas, but VAN’s factories needed patterns and
three-dimensional versions of the garments to make true copies. While
traveling to the United States on business, Kensuke Ishizu bought up
a few pieces at Brooks Brothers to use as guides, but these could not
be extrapolated into an entire clothing line. Kurosu resorted to
hitting the black markets, where he could scrounge around in piles of
discarded GI clothes for Ivy-like garments.
As the full Ivy line
came together in 1962—chino pants, navy blazers, seersucker
jackets, rep ties—VAN updated its logo to appeal to a younger
audience. Kensuke Ishizu placed his original red-and-black stencil
logo in a circle with the catchphrase “for the young and young at
heart.”
The wider apparel
industry was unsupportive of the Ivy trend. Ishizu decided that VAN
would take it directly to teens.
As fashion-conscious
men looked more to magazines than to department stores for style
guidance, from 1963 onward VAN used its shadow editorial control of
Men’s Club to fill each issue with minutiae of modern American
collegiate life. There were explorations of elbow
patches, detailed
looks into the “V-zone of an Ivy Leaguer,” and essays from
Kensuke Ishizu on critical matters such as “girls who understand
Ivy and girls who don’t.”
Despite these
efforts, Ivy primarily existed in Japan inside the magazine’s
pages. Almost all youth still wore their gakuran uniforms or equally
bland garments. Readers understood the imagery in Men’s Club—a
world where everyone lived surrounded by Ivy suits, Coca-Cola
bottles, and jazz records—as a pleasant fantasy. Dressing like this
in real life would certainly elicit ridicule from classmates and
neighbors. VAN needed to prove to their readers that there actually
were well-dressed youth roaming the cities of Japan.
In the spring of
1963, Toshiyuki Kurosu started a column in Men’s Club called “Ivy
Leaguers on the Street,” where he and a photographer took snaps of
young passersby in Ginza who dressed similarly to East Coast preps.
Kurosu picked the best and wrote accompanying captions. This soon
became readers’ favorite part of the magazine. With this, Kurosu
may have invented “street snaps”—the distinct style of
documentary fashion photography that now appears in nearly every
Japanese fashion magazine.
In truth Tokyo
barely had adequate numbers of fashionable men to fill each issue’s
pages. But the work got easier once teens started to hang around the
neighborhood’s main avenues in contrived outfits with the hope of
catching Kurosu’s eye. Subsequent editions of the column showed a
more pronounced Ivy League style, a trend which snowballed as teens
tried to outdo the young men in the previous issue.
VAN customers in the
first half of the 1960s came exclusively from three groups:
celebrities, creatives at top advertising firms, and the sons of
wealthy families. In the United States, Ivy represented the casual
style of elite university students, but the style reached far beyond
East Coast campuses because of its ease of fit, rugged materials, and
reliance on basic styles. Not so in Japan. VAN had so far only found
consumers at the very top of society.
To make things
easier on their pupils, Ishizu, Kurosu, and the others at VAN decided
they needed to break Ivy down into a set of dos and don’ts. They
summarized their mission thus:
When you buy
medicine, the instructions are always included. There is a proper way
of taking the medicine, and if you do not take the medicine
correctly, there may be adverse effects. Same goes for dressing
up—there are rules you cannot ignore. Rules teach you style
orthodoxy and help you follow the correct conventions for dress.
Starting with Ivy is the fastest way to get you there.
In the pages of
Men’s Club, Kurosu became the unofficial headmaster of the Ivy
school. He ran an Ivy Q&A column in the back of the magazine. He
told readers, for example, not to wear ties with their sports shirts
and to avoid tie tacks and cufflinks with blazers, while also
advocating for the mentality of Ivy: an easy East Coast nonchalance.
Kurosu warned a reader threatening to wear a button-down collar with
the buttons undone, “It has to feel natural. It’s the absolute
worst if other people think you’ve left them intentionally
unbuttoned.” Kurosu, a twenty-something who had never lived in the
United States, was playing referee with confidence that came from
years of research—but also a good measure of bluffing.
VAN was so
successful in using these definitive proclamations to get both
readers and retailers on the same page that Japanese fashion today
still retains this emphasis on rules. U.S. Ivy League style was
steeped in tradition, class privilege, and subtle social
distinctions. The best part of collegiate fashion was its unconscious
cool. No one read manuals; they just imitated their fathers,
brothers, and classmates. In Japan VAN needed to break down Ivy into
a distinct protocol so that a new convert could take up the style
without having ever seen an actual American. Men’s Club often gave
the same styles the fun of filing taxes.
But readers ate it
up, and their demand for instruction only resulted in an even greater
tyranny of details. A true Ivy shirt had a small “locker loop”
under the collar and a center box pleat. Ivy men wore a pocket square
in the “Ivy fold,” a necktie exactly seven centimeters wide, and
an “orthodox” pant length. A biblical dogma developed about the
Ivy suit jacket’s center hooked vent, even though its presence on
the back of the jacket made it mostly invisible. Men’s Club warned
against the danger of slanted jacket pockets—a nefarious “anti-Ivy
technique.” 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, consolidating his position, laid down the master concept for
Western dress in Japanese with just three letters: TPO (tī pī ō in
Japanese), 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.
Ishizu later
formalized the TPO idea with a guidebook called When, Where, What to
Wear. The pocket-sized volume offered lists of ideal outfits,
coordination styles, and fabric types, as well as diagrams on how to
get the perfect suit fit. The book was an immediate bestseller.
Electronics maker Sony passed out copies to every male employee.
Ivy turned into big
business for VAN Jacket. By 1967 the company hit 3.6 billion yen in
revenue ($71 million in 2015 dollars), and at the end of the decade,
6.9 billion yen ($111 million in 2015 dollars). In these years VAN
did not just clothe the nation in Ivy League style but acted as
Japanese youth’s introduction to a more Americanized lifestyle, in
which clothing played a major role in forming a distinct identity.
With traditional Japanese culture discredited by its defeat in World
War II, youth were desperate for a new set of values. And at just the
right time, VAN offered an idealized version of American life.
The company also
benefited from the fact that real Americans were gradually
disappearing from the Tokyo landscape. By the mid-1960s GIs were few
in number and generally confined to their bases in remote areas.
Youth in Tokyo instead learned about the American people from VAN,
Men’s Club, and Hollywood films. They came to see the United States
as not a wartime enemy or postwar occupier but as the home of jazz,
fancy colleges, button-down collars, and blond bombshells.
Ivy style in the
1960s marked a critical moment when men started dressing up, and it
set the pattern for 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.
On May 24, 2005,
VAN Jacket founder Kensuke Ishizu died at the age of ninety-three. By
then millions of Japanese men—students, employees, executives, and
retirees—were following Ishizu’s principles of Ivy as their basic
style. Ishizu taught the 1960s generation how to dress, and they
passed down those sartorial lessons to their children.
Ishizu did not just
kick off the culture of Japanese menswear but kept it replicating the
values of VAN Jacket through a sophisticated industry in Japan. The
most successful brand to come out of the VAN Jacket family is global
apparel giant Fast Retailing, whose marquee chain, Uniqlo, has over
1,500 stores in eighteen countries. Founder Tadashi Yanai’s father
ran a small VAN franchise in the industrial town of Ube, Yamaguchi,
called Ogōri Shōji. Ishizu renamed it Men’s Shop OS to attract a
younger crowd.
Yanai opened the
first Uniqlo in Hiroshima in 1985, and while many of Uniqlo’s best
sellers over the years—brightly colored down jackets, fleece,
thermal underwear—have not necessarily been Ivy items, Yanai’s
dedication to selling unisex basics at reasonable prices echoes the
original mission of VAN Jacket. Toward the end of his life, Kensuke
Ishizu visited a Uniqlo store and told his son, “This is what I
wanted to make!”
CONTRIBUTOR
W. David Marx
W. David Marx, a
writer based in Tokyo, is the founder and editor of néojaponisme.com.
He is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, from
which this essay is excerpted. Available from Basic Books, a member
of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.
W. David Marx, a writer based in Tokyo, is the founder and editor of néojaponisme.com. He is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, from which this essay is excerpted. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.
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