Cultural fashion exchange explainedfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

No Japanese brands can do American fashion, but American brands can't do Japanese fashion. Now, is that necessarily true? I made a chart. So we've got Japanese brands, American brands. Japanese fashion, American fashion. Japanese brands do Japanese fashion very well, obviously. There are traditional Japanese techniques like Best, Sashiko, and tier are unmistakable Japanese silhouettes like kimono, noragi, but those are traditional Japanese clothes. Apart from that, there's also a Japanese identity in contemporary clothes. Seen in designers like Yoji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, there are some themes that emerge, like a monochromaticity, an emphasis on drape, an emphasis on texture, oversized silhouettes. You see that design language in legacy rank, but also in modern contemporary brands as well, that continue this identity. American brands obviously do American fashion very well. They have invented several sub genres of fashion. There's American denim with iconic American brands like Levi's, there's American worse with Carhartt, Red Wing, there's American military wear with alpha industries, and American Ivy or prep with Ralph Lauren. Then of course there's streetwear which America best. And then you have iconic brands like supreme, more modern brands like armet leon d'or, no, actually not no, but I think it starts to get interesting when Japan starts doing these American sub genres. Like, nigo's babe has been very successful at doing his version of American streetwear. The real McCoy's does the most faithful and authentic reproduction of American military wear down to the patina of certain buttons rank iconic Japanese brands like Bismim and Capital draw on Americana, draw on American influences for their own brand direction. And when it comes to American Ivy, the Japanese take on American Ivy is extremely influential. The Japanese arm of American brand J yes is six times bigger than the American counterpart. And now we have the most interesting quadrants, American brands doing Japanese fashion. And you can perhaps come to the conclusion that the Americans are not very interested in doing any other culture besides themselves. But I think that's wrong. I don't think that's necessarily true. Because I think that Americans are doing Japanese fashion, it's just that it's not very obvious. I think we are experiencing a third wave where the Japanese takes on American fashion have now fed back to America. We have now come full circle. American streetwear influences BAPE and now BAPE influences Pharrell. Our tier Levi's influences Japanese brands to start doing salvage denim and now modern Levi's has a made in Japan rank. And now we have very interesting iconic brands like three sixteen, which is an American brand that uses Japanese denim and makes their jeans in America. And they make both countries a key part of their identity. Tier. So ultimately we can talk about clothes just being clothes. But the clothes that we get now are a product of this ongoing ping pong cultural exchange that has happened over the last seventy years. And really, the chart that I have made to falsely box it into these quadrants is probably not the way we should think about it. What is really happening is that both countries are contributing to the same hybrid culture. And the most interesting thing about this phenomenon is that this hybrid fashion culture that they've created is seen by both sides as authentic, but it is also seen by both sides as exotic, as strange as the other, and is equally appealing to both cultures.