Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

Product Information

Denim trong counterculture tại Nhật Bản đầu những năm 1960, có rất nhiều điểm tương đồng với văn hóa Hippie tại Mỹ Japanese teenagers spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, money, and energy in pursuit of fashionable clothing, especially when compared to their global peers. America, with a population 2.5 times larger than Japan, has fewer than ten magazines focusing on men's style. Japan has more than 50.

It started in the mid-1960s just as the Baby Boomer generation hit college age and it’s continued from there. Tokyo has always been the centre of Japanese pop culture and it was the streets of Ginza in 1964 with the Miyuki Tribe when the first true youth consumer sub-culture appeared. Meanwhile, menswear was enjoying a revival of sorts in the United States. Online, it was referred to as #menswear—a mix of tailoring and casual East Coast prep that valued well-made goods and enthralling brand stories. Arguably the greatest influence on the trend, and on American style from 2009 until 2014, became Japan’s decades-old take on the same aesthetic: Ametora.Adults may have defeated the Miyuki Tribe, but Japanese youth would triumph in the greater war. Around the globe, from the 1960s onward, rebellious teenagers spurned parents and authorities and forged their own unique cultures, breaking free from their narrow identities as students. In Japan, the first and most important step was to replace the standard-issue school uniform with their own choice of stylish clothing. This interest in fashion started among youth from elite families, but spread to the masses in tandem with the country’s miraculous economic growth and explosion of mass media. Since the Ivy takeover of Ginza, Japan has been on a fifty-year trajectory towards its current status as the world most style-obsessed nation. Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style is a MUST for anyone with any interest in fashion, particularly Japanese fashion. In fact, fashion aficionados of the 21st century now know that you cannot possibly disentangle the geneneralised concept of 'fashion' from 'Japanese fashion', the most vibrant and diverse fashion industry in the world and home to the greatest number of men's fashion magazines per capita and a fashion-forward and hype-focused population like no other. But it wasn't always this way, which was the central message the book tried to convey. I have some issue with Ametora's subtitle, as most of the book is a history of post-war Japanese fashion. It starts with the charity drive for clothes in the immediate-post-war period, when Japan had basically been bombed flat, and continued with Japan looking to America as a fashion beacon, Kensuke Ishizu bringing East Coast Ivy League style to Japan and spreading its gospel through a rigid series of rules that taught men how to properly dress, through the suspicion from the Japanese establishment, Marxists adopting blue jeans as a symbol of revolution, an introduction of the America 50s into the Japanese 70s, and so on until post-Bubble Economy, it was Japanese streetwear brands like A Bathing Ape and UNIQLO that were reminding Americans they didn't have to go everywhere in sweatpants and flip-flops. 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.

A renowned academic and true indigo expert, Balfour-Paul is coming up on three decades of practical experience with indigo plants and dyeing, and she’s been living and working in the Middle East and North Africa researching the magic blue dyestuff.At the end of the book, I make the point that the whole menswear-blog scene of seven or eight years ago started because the whole culture of dressing up has sort of disappeared for American men. So young guys couldn’t just go to their dad and ask, “What’s the best suit to buy?” because their dads don’t know. So they had to start from basics the same way Japanese men did in the 1960s. I mean excuse me? Takuya Kimura is an icon in Japan and probably out of Japan too. The “questionable talent” bit sounds vaguely insulting, especially since he’s trying to explain Japanese fashion and Japanese culture to an American audience – it just sounds like after all the trouble he took to take various subcultures in Japan seriously, he could not bother to do the same for pop culture. When I first read this book, I was troubled by its seeming abundance of blind spots: although it did devote a section of the book to the vintage craze of Harajuku, I was surprised that it didn't mention the Fruits magazine at all. Of course, Harajuku fashion is much more trendy right now during our current Y2k resurgence, but still--I sometimes felt that this book focused too much on individuals who changed the fashion industry, instead of the large swathes of nameless teens from the lower and middle classes who created entirely new styles during the aftermath of Japan's lost decade. It began with the gradual adoption and promotion of the Ivy League lookin the late 1950s. Japan adopted and cycled through their own version of pretty much every American subculture, studying and replicating the clothes in unstinting detail, often around the same time as American brands themselves were starting to outsource production or lower their own standards. Cue: Kensuke Ishizu. The most important name to remember on this list. Son of a paper wholesaler and born in 1911 in the southwest city of Okayama, Japan, he became the “Godfather” of Japanese prep, single-handedly sparking the Ivy Style revolution that rapidly permeated through Japan through the mid-1900s. Although he was eternally obsessed with Westernism and was considered to be a mobo himself, Ishizu did not directly work in designing menswear until he scored a position as the menswear designer for Japan’s largest undergarment maker at the time, Renown. For the 3 years following occupation, he learned the rules of the trade, educating himself on high-end retail and the market of western fashion, eventually splitting from Renown and establishing his own brand, Ishizu Shoten. Although a time of great poverty, with few citizens spending time purchasing new clothes, and less so luxury ones, Ishizu was convinced that the desire for Westernized style would soon return.

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 ! 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. Based on firsthand research, Jeans of the Old West uncovers a chapter of denim’s history that previously had been sort of left in the dark; the years when Levi’s was the only jeans maker who could use rivets in ‘the old west.’ Amekaji” is the term used to describe American casual style, specifically “Ametora” refers to the American Traditional fashion style in Japan.Absolutely. I guess I’m also taking for granted the fact that America has really caught up in terms of certain products. Like, you don’t have to buy Japanese denim if you want quality raw, unsanforized denim. A lot of American brands make them. But Japanese denim did sort of take over in terms of being the most reliable vintage-y-feeling selvedge denim, but also Cone Mills would have never started making their selvedge again had they not seen Japanese brands pulling their selvedge looms. The whole Levi’s Vintage Clothing brand started in Japan before the United States, about two years prior. At first the idea of raw selvedge was seen as a crazy Japan thing, but then they realized they could do it in the U.S. But I don’t want to take anything away from the U.S. and say that Japan caused this revival. There was also a large influence from Hong Kong, specifically Hypebeast, which created a bridge between products coming from Japan and the United States. Interestingly enough, this act of cultural style exchange all began with Japan’s desire to westernize their culture after 265 years of economic, political and social isolation from the rest of the world. When the isolation came to an abrupt hault, Japan was simultaneously thrown into complete economic and cultural turmoil. After years of chaos, and an ultimate loss of cultural and social identity, a reform-minded samurai finally took control under the reign of Emperor Meiji, initiating his reformation plan that worked to adopt Western technology and lifestyles. Honestly? This was THE best book I've read all year. Which is just as well, because 2016 is now almost over and I have just managed to hit my target reads for the year.