For the Love of the Good Stuff: In Praise of Amekaji and Worlds of Difference Come Together

I come from a working-class immigrant family that got its “step” in the Madmen 50s.  My father wore suits to work when my uncles wore uniforms or workwear.  They all managed to get along after 5pm.

 

While my dad never finished his architectural degree from Columbia---he was Registered without the degree---he very much took to heart his Ivy connection and he always dressed the part.  That he’d made the transition from blue to white collar work was no small matter even in consideration of the structural privileges and biases that shape every American life.

 

We’d not come from an educated family but rather one of makers: shipbuilders, tailors, bakers, firemen, and soldiers.  Before his fortunes declined, my dad wore bespoke shirts from NYC tailors and handmade shoes from New England; he took his cues from the likes of David Niven, Gary Cooper, and Ronald Coleman.  Think Coleman and Cary Grant in the 1942 movie Talk of the Town and that’s my father.  He was rarely without a tie, a proper fedora, and a pipe in his hand.  He matched elegance with dry humor, every hard day’s work ending with Chivas and a drop of water to set the evening’s note.  When I was a kid his suit jacket would swap out for a sweater and he’d not take off his tie until after dinner when he dressed for bed.  The standard was high in our house in those days.

 

And then the ‘60s came.  His sons rebelled in most every way but neither myself nor my brother could forsake our father’s sense of style.  We were adding, not subtracting.

 

I happened to be lucky enough to just miss the worst of Vietnam, get the best of the Civil Rights Movement, and go to college uninterrupted by world events.

 

As a kid I’d been informed first by the ’50 Greaser revolution, my older brother’s generation who brought us Brando, Dean, and Elvis.  They were all bikers to begin with. Then when I Want Hold Your Hand turned into Strawberry Fields, the end of the ‘60s upon us, I was a teen in the middle of the denim revolution where hippies and psychedelics on this side of the pond first came to know about the mods, rockers, and glam from over there.

 

By the time I was 15 I had assimilated Ivy elegance, biker leathers, and Hippie denim: I didn’t have to choose which represented my style because they had all been present in my life. 

 

It was’75  when the Boss blended the old school Greasers’ look into post-hippy rock star cool on the cover of Born to Run.  I got my personal memo.  It was going to be a story of class breaking boundaries and racial inclusion brought about by the egalitarianism of rock’ n’ roll as a true American art form and jazz as its sophisticated cousin.  Miles and Ellington would wear JPress too, not just professors.  Bruce would never forget how Schott and Levis had made for cool back in the post-war era of early rock and soul.

 

You don’t have to like any of this music to get the message: the old boundaries and divisions could all find a place on life’s stage. For me it was Springsteen standing next to Clarence that told the story I really wanted to tell the world.  When they stood with the more psychedelic Stevie van Zandt who eventually quit the band to rally for global justice, well that put together who I wanted to be and how I wanted to look.

 

Well, how I wanted to look when I wasn’t dressing for school.  You see school was my only hope for a gig---I wasn’t going to be a rock star or jazz hero.  I stayed in school with those Ivy kids who didn’t know I came from bikers and street kid rockers.

 

By 1979 my father’s Ivy style meet my own and I had his hand-me-down Oxfords; my brother’s leathers and denim had been literally stolen from his closet and came with me to University.  Now what?  All of these styles came from mightily different worlds, offered incommensurate social commentaries yet each stood for something that I wanted.

 

I wanted elegance and legitimacy.  I wanted revolution and social justice and rock’ n’ roll’s freedom.  I wanted some of that wind in my face wearing leathers on a fast bike even if I spent more time buried in the bowels of the library studying dead languages.

I came from all of these worlds as a matter of personal history: born when Eisenhower was president, awakened by The Beatles, and running from Jersey in August ’75, just like the Boss told us.

 

We’re all trying to make our way but we’re made as much by our histories---the politics, the style, the music and art, the fads, the cool of our times.  I was very much in the footsteps of an older father and elder brother who provided me benchmarks.  My own circumstances made for the critical tipping points.  I would fly off to the Far Side of the World for a decade apart from all of this---but that is another story.  I knew that I needed all of these worlds and so all of these styles to navigate into a future that would add more (not less) incongruity, complexity, and confusion into the mix of personal identity.

 

It wasn’t until 2016 when I read W. David Marx’s Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style that I realized that I'd lived through and with the times in which post-war Japanese had appropriated, reinvented, and made their own the styles that my father, my brother, and I had all been party to.

 

The Japanese are searching for their own cool but they were wise enough to look across boundaries and into worlds unfamiliar to experiment with their own self-creativities.  I think I even touched some of their process into Amekaji.  And that’s an almost funny and true story worth telling.

 

One afternoon standing at the now-defunct kiosk in Harvard Square I was reading a European cycling magazine. As a graduate student I couldn’t afford to buy the magazine so I hid beneath the sign that declared this was a newsstand, not a library.  Nonetheless I persisted.  I was dressed in an OCBD, a bow tie, and Harris tweed.  I’m pretty sure I also was wearing a JPress shaggy dog sweater---I’d scored that when they had a store in Cambridge. I looked up to see two Japanese men across the magazine aisle looking my way, one holding a camera.  I smiled, they walked over, and to my surprise asked if they could take my picture.  Me? Why?  I didn’t ask anything further.  They pulled me to the sidewalk to grab the light and fired off a few shots, then smiled, bowed, and walked on. I went back in to review the Tour de France results.

 

That was 1979 or so and just about the time in Japan when the Amekaji movement was finishing up its investment in Ivy style and stepping deeply into denim and post-war militaria.  I was nobody but these two Japanese fellas clearly had taken an interest in my style.  Could their pursuit Amekaji have been their motive?  This possibility had never occurred to me until I read Marx’s book.

 

Fast forward to the present and I know that were it not for the Japanese investment and reinvention of American style, I would not be enjoying my own history nearly as much as I do now.  My denim, leather jackets, and boots are Japanese while my Oxford button downs are still largely American made by O’Connell’s, Gitman Vintage, and JPress (though the Japanese maker Kamakura has done a fine job).  I still wear Aldens from the Ivy and Indy days and keep a legacy closet of old knit and repp ties.

 

But what's different now is that it's all come together.

 

My own style hasn’t much changed since 1980 but for that brief foray into Italian suits in the ‘90s we all took.  But in truth, I’m a child of still ‘50s Ivy, ‘60s leather, and ‘70s denim (well, maybe closer today to those ’50’s 501 straight cut) but I think you get the picture.  What younger men are getting hip to now, what I see on IG and in conversations is their recognition of how those eras made our current cool and how those times inform our passions for fine vintage wear. 

 

I surmise that there have to be a few others for whom this Great Triad of American style---Ivy, Leather Biker, and Denim workwear---revived, recreated, renovated into better by the Japanese---comes together to form their own complex mix and not quite match.  Styles that weren’t put together then seem only rarely put together now but those possibilities are before us.

 

As a college professor I have a lot of flexibility when it comes to how I look.  But typically I still wear a tie, usually a repp or a solid, with an OCBD but then I’ll add a leather, a Cossack, or denim jacket.  Mix that with proper heavy straight cut jeans, and boots in any number of styles from engineers, service and Jodhpurs to Indys and other Aldens and there you have it.  What in my day might also include some LLBean and, yes, Abercrombie when they sold workwear nothing like the brand now, will nowadays include Filson, Dehen1920, and other PNW makers, especially in boots.  Put it together.  It’s not Ivy.  It’s not biker,  It’s not denim head.  It’s all of them.

 

These looks made me as much as I’ve been remade by the Japanese Amekaji. The Japanese have brought their passion and care to reproducing the past and creating a present that is both transmission and tradition, reproduction and innovation.  Honestly, my jeans and boots and leather jackets have never been better made and there are still things made by only a few that speak to the quality and craft of these heritage styles, now better than ever.

 

Over in IG worlds and in most of the conversations I have about heritage men’s wear there isn’t much cross over and blending among these worlds.  Ivy seems pretty far out of favor with those who prefer workwear style.  The Blend Flex hasn't quite arrived but it is there for the making.

 

The worlds that created these distinctive looks were synchronic---most of today’s vintage wear from Ivy to workwear happened in more or less the same time periods.

 

As it was “back then” these styles represented very different elements of society, different class and work identities, and they didn’t mix or match across those boundaries.  The Japanese didn’t care about those differences because those social realities were obviously not theirs.  What that means is that we can find all of these worlds suffused into a complexity that is Amekaji.

 

That is exactly my aim: to cross the divides of style not only because I was lucky enough to experience them all but because they each, in their own way, represent a self-conscious choice that men can make to take care, suggest pride in their work and appearance.

 

What the Japanese have brought to this renaissance of style are their own deep historical commitments to doing things with assiduous devotion and attention to detail, aiming for perfection in imperfection, and raising the bar so that we can all share in the good stuff.  May your flex be your own.

*This piece deserves plenty of photos and I will return with those soon.