kewrater

[kewrater]

How to Think About Color [excerpt]

There are lots of ways to think about color in men’s fashion, but the important thing to keep in mind that it has social and emotional content – not just artistic.

Choosing colors for an outfit isn’t just about choosing things that look nice next to each other. It’s about understanding broader aesthetic traditions and knowing how to speak a language. Back in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky famously put forward “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of how a sentence can be grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. Much like words in a sentence, meaningfully combining colors in an outfit can also require knowing something about how colors have been used in the past.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to this – you just have to pay attention to how certain groups dress, both in historical and contemporary terms. Luckily, most people pick it up in short time, even if they’re not conscious of it. The key here is to remember that swapping out colors in an outfit isn’t like choosing a different color for a painting. Sometimes it’s like choosing a different word in a sentence.

Related to the idea of social language, there’s also a very rich emotional language in colors.

Take black, for instance. Historically, it’s come to mean all sorts of things. It’s the color of seriousness and somberness, thanks to the Victorians, but also of humility and discretion, thanks to certain ascetic religious groups (e.g. Orthodox Jews and The Quakers). At the same time, black also symbolizes evil (think: witches and motorcycle gangs).

Fashion designers sometimes use black to communicate those emotional values. Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto, for example, are famous for how they use the color to create a sort of cold, stand-off-ish attitude. In an all-too-often cited quote, Yamamoto once summed it up nicely: “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy, but mysterious. But above all black says this: ‘I don’t bother you, don’t bother me.’” Guys who wear those lines rely on white and grey for their other pieces, largely because they underscore the power of black.

Of course, color isn’t about just emotional and social language. There’s the more obvious and intuitive dimension: how something looks, purely as a visual medium.

[kewrater]

Tulsa

[kewrater]

“Attention to intention manifests love divine.”

[kewrater]

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is one I absolutely do not subscribe to. [...] When people can't control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people's behavior. When you're around super sensitive people, you cannot relax and be spontaneous because you have no idea what's going to upset them next.

John Cleese

[kewrater]

Because of the ease with which they're put on and removed--along, perhaps, with their generic ubiquity--flip-flops connote a sort of half-dressed slatternliness, a sense that the wearer has forgotten to do anything at all with his or her body from the ankles down.

Dana Stephens

[kewrater]

The Suit That Couldn’t Be Copied

I had the sense that if I wore a garment by Taub, I would become a different person. It was this desire—combined with the fact that one of his overcoats starts at around six thousand dollars, and one of his suits at eight thousand—that made me wonder if I could get a tailor in some less expensive part of the world to copy one of his garments. [...]

I was concerned, though, about copying Taub’s designs—in effect stealing his intellectual property. To me, this seemed cretinous; I’m bothered, after all, that people have posted PDFs of my novels on the Web, so why should I do the same to someone else? With the hope of getting Taub’s blessing, I e-mailed him and asked if he would be willing to comment on and perhaps advise a tailor who was trying to copy what he had done. I told him that I would write an article about this attempt at reproduction.

Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely a form. Many of the decisions that go into making a garment what it is—how tightly a piece of cloth is pinched when it is sewn, or what angle the needle enters at—leave no trace except in the result.

[kewrater]

The end product is intention--having intentionality at all times. The process of process is process.

Stephen Colbert

[kewrater]

Although the nature of love is not easy to define, it has an intrinsic order, an architecture that can be detected, excavated, and explored. Emotional experience, in all its resplendent complexity, cannot emerge ex vacuo: it must originate in dynamic neural systems humming with physiologic machinations as specific and patterned as they are intricate.

A General Theory of Love

[kewrater]

The End of Office Dress Codes?

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday on the end – or at least the slow death – of office dress codes. Offices around the country have been giving up on the coat-and-tie uniform for decades. Indeed, the last NYT article about serious, rigid dress codes was perhaps back in 1986. Titled “Admit It or Not, Work Dress Codes Are a Fact of Life,” the article talks about how a jacket-and-tie are required in high-end services (e.g. finance and law) because of the need to look professional in front of clients. 

Since then, the Casual Friday movement of the ‘90s and hoodie-wearing Silicon Valley geeks of the early-aughts have made the coat-and-tie uniform a thing of the past. Just last month, Vanessa Friedman wrote about how bankers are now shedding their tailored clothes for more casual wear (think: the kind of stealth wealth styles sold at Loro Piana and Cucinelli). And last winter, Crowe Horwath – one of the larger US accounting firms – announced a new code encouraging employees to show up in jeans and button-ups (although suits are still required for meetings). 

The current wave of dress-code decline is being pushed by hot-button issues surrounding gender equality and fluidity. Women shouldn’t need to wear heels if men aren’t required to wear uncomfortable footwear; and men shouldn’t have to cinch ties around their necks if women don’t. This last December, the NYC Commission on Human Rights announced new guidelines for a municipal law that expressly prohibits “enforcing dress codes, uniforms, and grooming standards that impose different requirements based on sex or gender.” 

All this sounds great in a small-L, European liberalism sort of way (ideas of individualism, freedom, and equality that have dominated Western thought since the Age of Enlightenment). Why not live and let live, after all? Open dress codes speak to our values – clothes are superficial, individuals should be able choose for themselves, and everyone should be treated equally. 

Indeed, the NYT poses this as a fundamental shift to the rights of individuals:

“There’s a strain of thought that says an employee represents a company, and thus dress is not about personal expression, but company expression,” Professor Scafidi said. “But there’s a counterargument that believes because we identify so much with our careers, we should be able to be ourselves at work.”

[…]

“We are moving into an era where personal expression is going to trump the desire to create a corporate identity,” Professor Scafidi said. “It’s a huge power shift.” 

But is that actually true? The article ignores that the lack of formal dress codes just means informal ones take their place. Open dress environments aren’t nearly as open as the NYT suggests. 

Unless you work in a creative industry and live in a big city (read: basically NYC), you probably can’t wear anything too fashionable or avant-garde to work. We’re not talking about Rick Owens, but even somewhat tame designers such as Robert Geller and Stephan Schneider. And if everyone is wearing shorts and t-shirts, the sharpest you can look is in chinos. New, open office spaces still have dress codes – they’re just softly coded as social norms, not hard written into rulebooks. 

The whole situation has left many men confused on what they’re supposed to wear. “Are grey flannel pants too dressy?” “Are sneakers too sloppy?” “How should I dress for the meeting/ office party/ interview?” When Crowe Horwath gave up on the jacket-and-tie uniform last winter, they had to make a long (and somewhat corny) video explaining what was not acceptable.

This “not too formal, but still professional” soft dress code has basically given men one uniform: jeans (sometimes chinos) with a button-up shirt (probably gingham). Not as interesting as casualwear could be; not as sharp as the jacket-and-tie. It’s not ugly, it’s just vanilla bland. You could break it, of course, but at the risk of paying a social cost. See the hundreds of emails I’ve received from readers over the years asking what they should wear if a suit is out-of-step at their office, but they also don’t want to stand out for being too fashionable. 

So, what do we lose? A more formal outfit not only makes you look sharper and more professional, studies show they also make you think better at work. Notably, the old dress code also allowed men to put on a uniform that made them look good, without requiring them to think too much about it. Uniforms blend into the background, to some degree. The new code allows for more self-expression, yes, but it takes a lot more effort to figure out how to dress around soft, social norms. 

A couple of years ago, Anna North wrote an NYT op-ed about how the new, cool office environment “can be just as oppressive as the old, buttoned-up one.” Dressing now follows subtle, in-group views – those who understand them know how to navigate the corporate world; those who don’t pay a price:

“The theme is familiar to anyone who’s tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”

Silicon Valley start-ups may not care about professionalism in the pants-that-aren’t-jeans sense — they may actively discourage it — but, in Mr. Bueno’s formulation, they have a set of codes that may be even more restrictive because only those already in the clique really understand them. He writes:

“The first step toward dissolving these petty Cultures is writing down their unwritten rules for all to see. The word ‘privilege’ literally means ‘private law.’ It’s the secrecy, deniable and immune to analysis, that makes the balance of power so lopsided in favor of insiders.”

In the best of all worlds, people could genuinely wear whatever they wanted to work – so someone in J. Crew’s bizcaz clothes can work alongside someone in Rick Owens drop-crotch pants and another in a Brooks Brothers suit. That’s always been the criticism of liberalism (again, meant in the old European sense, not American Democrat sense): it assumes too much agency on the part of the individual. Hard dress codes have largely disappeared, yes, but in their place are just soft, social norms that still regulate people’s behavior. Whether that’s better or worse is questionable. 

(photo via the 1960 film The Apartment)

[kewrater]

Why New Yorkers Have Always Worn Black

[...] The duke of Burgundy was, in the 15th century, the first to wear black after the end of a mourning period; the color afterward became a symbol of power, elegance, and luxury (at the time, black dye was incredibly costly). By the 19th century, black was more affordable, and available, and not just for mourning: Dyed-black glossy fabrics like velvet and satin were considered ideal for a portrait session because of the clean lines and strong silhouettes. [...]

By midcentury, the color had become the thing to wear in New York if you were knowing, creative, or powerful. Also, notably, masculine. Jackson Pollock exemplified the supremely macho artist, and he exemplified this while wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. Black was the uniform of the jazz musician, then the downtown beatnik, then the punk. The kid with the Mohawk panhandling on St. Marks wears black, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Park Avenue hostess does too, knowing she could never go wrong if she just wore it with pearls. She’d be taking her cue from Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, who, never mind that she was a hooker, was the picture of refinement when dressed by Hubert de Givenchy. “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time,” the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto has said. “But above all, black says this: ‘I don’t bother you, you don’t bother me.’”

[kewrater]

The Miyuki-Zoku, 1964

David Marx posted this great photo on Twitter today. Shown above are some members of the Miyuki-zoku, a 1960s Japanese youth movement that revolved around Ivy Style clothes. Somewhat notable: the men are seen wearing short jackets and heavily cropped trousers, some fifty years before Thom Browne would build his career off the same look. 

An excerpt from an old blog post by David Marx:

The first Japanese to adopt elements of the Ivy League Look were a youth tribe called the Miyuki-zoku, who suddenly appeared in the summer of 1964. The group’s name came from their storefront loitering on Miyuki Street in the upscale Ginza shopping neighborhood (the suffix “zoku” means subculture or social group). The Miyuki-zoku were mostly in their late teens, a mix of guys and girls, likely numbering around 700 at the trend’s peak. Since they were students, they would arrive in Ginza wearing school uniforms and have to change in to their trendy duds in cramped café bathrooms.

And what duds they were. The Miyuki-zoku were devotees of classic American collegiate style. The uniform was button-down oxford cloth shirts, madras plaid, high-water trousers in khaki and white, penny loafers, and three-button suit jackets. Everything was extremely slim. The guys wore their hair in an exact seven-three part, which was new for Japan. They were also famous for carrying around their school uniforms inside of rolled-up brown paper grocery bags.

What lead to the sudden arrival of the Miyuki-zoku? Although Japanese teens had been looking to America since 1945 for style inspiration, these particular youth were not copying Princeton or Columbia students directly. In fact, Japanese kids at this time rarely got a chance to see Americans other than the ever-present US soldiers.

The Miyuki-zoku had found the Ivy look through a new magazine called Heibon Punch. The periodical was targeted to Japan’s growing number of wealthy urban youth, and part of its editorial mission was to tell kids how to dress. The editors advocated the Ivy League Look, which at the time was basically only available in the form of domestic brand VAN. Kensuke Ishizu of VAN had discovered the look in the 1950s and pushed it as an alternative to the slightly thuggish big-shouldered, high-waisted, mismatched jacket-and-pants look that dominated Japanese men’s style throughout the 1950s. As an imported look, Ivy League fashion felt cutting-edge and sophisticated to Tokyo teens, and this fit perfectly with Heibon Punch‘s mission of giving Baby Boomers a style of their own.

When the magazine arrived in the spring 1964, readers all went out and became Ivy adherents. Parents and authorities, however, were hardly thrilled with a youth tribe of American style enthusiasts. The first strike against the Miyuki-zoku is that the guys — gasp! — would blow dry their hair. This was seen as a patently feminine thing to do.

You can read the rest here.

[kewrater]

You want to stop that movement from the popcorn to the mouth, get people to stop chewing.

Marlon Brando on acting, from Listen to Me Marlon

[kewrater]

Yves Jobert

[kewrater]

Interview with W. David Marx, Author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

Whether you’re into prep, denim, or streetwear, W. David Marx’s new book Ametora will have something to say about why you wear the things you do today. Ametora (which is Japanese for “American traditional”) traces Japan’s obsession with American style, going all the way from the days of Ivy Style and Take Ivy to Heavy Duty, vintage workwear/ denim, and then street fashion brands such as A Bathing Ape. And, of course, how those Japanese trends eventually influenced the heritage revival in the US and our own tastes. His book is a fascinating look not only into men’s style, but also cultural identity and globalization. We recently chatted with Marx about his project. 

What do you mean when you say Japan “saved American style?”

Saved here has a few meanings. First, there’s saving as in archiving. The Japanese fashion industry has done an incredible job archiving the entirety of American style over the last seventy years — from Ivy to workwear to outdoor to rock'n'roll greasers to military. If the United States disappeared tomorrow, we could easily reconstruct the history of American style just from Japanese sources.

Then there’s the more debatable meaning: saving as rescuing. There are very concrete examples of where Japan has resuscitated extinct or nearly extinct parts of the American clothing tradition. The most obvious is selvedge denim. Just as American mills stopped weaving denim on narrow shuttle looms in the early 1980s, Japanese brands Big John and Studio D'Artisan pushed their local denim suppliers to make slubby selvedge.

And there is an economic argument: Japanese consumption of traditional heritage American brands such as Alden (or even streetwear brands such as Stussy) gave those companies financial stability when American tastes would have otherwise led them elsewhere.

We shouldn’t forget how bleak everything looked for traditional styles in the U.S. about a decade ago. That’s not true in Japan, however. In 2005, more people in Japan dressed like 1960s Harvard undergraduates than actual Harvard undergraduates. So we should at least explore how much of today’s U.S. heritage revival is influenced by the Japanese archived version rather than being an organic flow from the actual historical tradition. Americans have gone back, intentionally or not, to Japanese examples of American style for reference because they were often more available than the original garments.

You have a ton of primary sources in this book, much of which has never been seen before. Tell me a little about what it took to research this topic.

Back in 2000-2001, I wrote my college thesis on A Bathing Ape and Japanese streetwear, so I’ve been interested in the history of Japanese fashion since then. For Ametora, I started reading and researching in earnest about five years ago when I met VAN Jacket founder Kensuke Ishizu’s son Shōsuke and realized I should talk to everyone involved with bringing American fashion to Japan.

Besides interviews, the other important resource included old Japanese magazines, especially Men’s Club, Heibon Punch, and Popeye. I spent a lot of Saturdays in Tokyo’s National Diet Library photocopying magazine articles and obscure out-of-print books. Magazines used to have a lot of group discussions, which made it easy to understand how everyone felt about style in each era.

The only part of Ametora not well documented in Japanese texts is the hunt for vintage clothing in the 1980s and 1990s. That world still retains a bit of secrecy, but I managed to talk to a handful of key people to craft a general narrative.

Why do you think American style caught on so quickly after the war? 

One of the big misconceptions I hope to clear up with Ametora is that for the first two decades after the Occupation, the vast majority of Japanese men did not adopt American styles. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, only a small number of delinquents copied styles from American soldiers. Normally, students wore black uniforms, and adults wore vaguely British-style suits. It wasn’t until Kensuke Ishizu of VAN Jacket intentionally brought Ivy League style to Japan in the early 1960s did middle-class Japanese youth start to wear American-style clothing.

The Occupation certainly shaped Japan and set it up for cultural exchange with the U.S., but the spread of American styles was not “organic.” In fact, the more distance from the Occupation, the faster the adoption. By the mid-1960s, there were very few Americans in Japan, and so for a huge population of baby boomers, America did not represent an occupying army and the ignoble defeat of the war, but rather an imaginary, fantasy country far away with vast wealth, great music, and trendy clothing.

One of the themes in your book is about how Japan’s “obsession” with American style is sometimes not really about America at all. Can you elaborate on this point? 

The vast majority of Japanese consumers learned about American style by seeing other Japanese people wear it, rather than seeing Americans. So in the 1960s, Ivy went mainstream because young Japanese men read the magazines Men’s Club and Heibon Punch, both filled with Japanese models wearing the clothes, and would go to Japanese stores, such as Teijin Men’s Shop, to buy the Japanese brand VAN Jacket. Classic rock'n'roll style came in during the 1970s because of the singer Eikichi Yazawa and his band Carol rather than any direct contact with American greasers or Elvis.

As an economic powerhouse, the US has enjoyed the power to legitimize and evangelize its own pop culture more than other countries, but that culture spreads much faster overseas when it becomes rooted in local culture. Japanese fashion has shown that certain individuals pulled culture from the U.S. and then introduced that culture locally in a very Japanese way, which helped it spread across the country.

You have a great chapter on how a little-known publication called Whole Earth Catalog helped set up the catalog format of many Japanese magazines today. In that chapter, you talk about how these publications were criticized for their fetishization of products – and yet, oddly, a lot of people today feel that Japanese publications are better than their American counterparts. Do you think that’s just because we live in a very product-focused age, or have Japanese editors managed to create better publications despite that focus on consumerism?

Yes, I think that the intense product obsession in Seventies Japan is now a standard part of global culture. But the reason that Japanese magazines look so good is that there have never really been “pure” fashion magazines in the US for men like what you see in Japan. GQ and Esquire have always had a lot more beyond clothing. The Internet has made a huge difference because sites like Hypebeast or Four Pins (R.I.P.) can do daily posts on new products. These sites are beloved, because they let you shop before you go to a store, and that was always why Japanese readers loved catalog magazines.

Why do you think clothing has become such an important subculture in Japan? 

I don’t think menswear in Japan is a subculture or cult the way it is in the U.S. at the moment. Dressing well is very much mainstream, and even if the average Japanese guy may not be a nerd for designer labels, he is going to take his wardrobe relatively seriously. Even people without interest in clothing are likely to go to Beams or United Arrows and just pick out a few things that may be considered relatively fashion forward in the U.S.

Ametora goes through exactly why this happened, but I do think there’s a long history in Japan of clothing being important for demonstrating social rank and position. And in the postwar period, most people could not afford to buy cars or really decorate their homes, and so all youth energy went to buying music and clothing. When you’re in a big city like Tokyo, your clothing is basically your only way to show people who you are. 

You’ve been posting some great photos on Twitter. Can you explain what we’re seeing in some of these images?

Heavy Duty: These are pages from illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi’s “Heavy Duty Book.” Kobayashi helped bring American outdoor style to Japan, which he packaged under the term “heavy duty.” He was a big outdoorsman, and meant his columns and books to be a way to encourage people to go outside and enjoy camping and hiking, but his young followers were only really interested in figuring out what down jackets and 60/40 parkas to wear out in Ginza.

Shinjuku hippies: The Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo became ground zero for the hippie drop-out movement in the late 1960s to early 1970s — a mix of local bohemian values with imported American styles. Here you see a bunch of long-hair types in surplus military and denim jackets. And with very little in the way of recreational drugs, they liked to huff paint thinner in plastic bags.

Harajuku UFO: Harajuku today is essentially the world’s only entire neighborhood dedicated to youth fashion, but it only really exploded in the mid-1970s with the rise of the rock ‘n’ roll boom. Harajuku became both home to designer brands and underground chic, but also delinquent kids dancing in rock 'n’ roll groups in nearby Yoyogi Park. This photo is from a rare photo book called Harajuku UFO, which is filled with amateur photographs of delinquent kids hanging out there. The guy on the right is wearing his hair in the classic “regent” pompadour style.

Men’s Club Ivy Leaguers on the Street: Men’s Club started Japan’s first “street snaps” column in 1963 to show kids that real people actually wore the Ivy League style they advocated. And so every month they would show fifteen to twenty stylish kids, while Toshiyuki Kurosu wrote explanatory notes. This example is Men’s Club’s self-parody of the column, since all the people included are members of VAN Jacket and their friends. Here you see (from left to right, top to bottom): Kensuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu, Paul Hasegawa, Kazuo Hozumi, and Shosuke Ishizu.

It feels like Americana, prep, and denim have somewhat receded as trends in the US. Are they still important in Japan? 

At this point, the Japanese fashion market is so big and diverse that it includes literally everything. Old guys buy replicas of VAN Jacket clothing from the 1960s, middle-age guys buy hardcore repro denim, young guys buy a single Thom Browne shirt and wear it untucked over shorts. A lot of American styles are just so buried into the fashion culture that they are equally common in Japan as they are in the U.S. But at the same time, the editors and stylists at Popeye are now trying to do something very different than just historical Americana or even copy current American trends. 

What’s next for you? Are you working on any new projects and will you continue to write about men’s style? Are you still focusing on Japanese fashion or are you shifting to other things?

I’ve been running a web journal on Japanese culture called Néojaponisme with the graphic designer Ian Lynam for almost a decade, and this year we’re going to try to go “offline” with some interesting things. Most of the things I’ll do on men’s style will be supplemental material to Ametora. And then I’ll be slowly doing some research for a broader future book on the mechanics of cultural change.

Special thanks to David for his time! You can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Néojaponisme, and find his book at Amazon. 

(Photos via Warby Parker, Gus Walbolt, Ivy Style, and W. David Marx)

[kewrater]

You Don’t Need More Free Time

It’s not just that we have a shortage of free time; it’s also that our free time, in order to be satisfying, often must align with that of our friends and loved ones. We face a problem, in other words, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that you can solve on your own. [...]

Time is, in many ways, what sociologists call a “network good.”

Network goods are things that derive their value from being widely shared. Take your computer: Its value depends in large measure on how many other people also have a computer. This is because you use your computer as, among other things, a communication technology: for Internet access, email, Facebook and file sharing. When everyone you know has a computer, the technology is indispensable. But if you were the only person with a computer, its value would be limited.

Free time is also a network good. The weekend derives much of its importance from the fact that so many people are off work together.

[kewrater]

Scratch Circles:

While winter has been fairly mild so far this year along the Great Lakes of the U.S., the winds that typically buffet the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan continue to blow unabated. However, the lack of snow and ice on the beaches has allowed unique features called scratch circles, or Scharrkreise, to form on the sand. Etched by windblown, dried dune grasses, the circles take shape when the wind causes a bent stalk of grass to pivot around on its axis, scratching out an arc or full circle in the sand.

[kewrater]

She was loud and talkative and moved through us like a walking television that's been left on and that you don't want to watch.

I Thought My Father Was God, edited by Paul Auster