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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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AMETORA

W. David Marx

How Japan Saved American Style

The story of how Japan adopted and ultimately revived traditional American fashion.
A strange thing has happened over the last two decades: the world has come to believe that the most "authentic" American garments are those made in Japan. From high-end denim to oxford button-downs, Japanese brands such as UNIQLO, Kamakura Shirts, Beams, and Kapital have built their global businesses by creating the highest-quality versions of classic American casual garments - a style known in Japan as ametora, or "American traditional."

In Ametora, cultural historian W. David Marx traces the Japanese assimilation of American fashion over the past 150 years. Now updated with a new afterword covering the last decade, Ametora shows how Japanese trendsetters and entrepreneurs mimicked, adapted, imported, and ultimately perfected American style, dramatically reshaping not only Japan's culture but also our own.


W. David Marx is a writer on culture, fashion, and music. He is the author of Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. A former editor of the Tokyo-New York street culture magazine Tokion, his work has appeared in Vox, Popeye, NewYorker.com, and Lapham's Quarterly. He lives in Tokyo.
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Published 2023-09-01 by Basic Books

Comments

Japan: Disk Union ; China: Shanghai Century Publishing ; Korea: Workroom Press ; Taiwan: Akker Publishing ; Thailand: Salmon Books

W. David Marx is our most insightful observer of the pop culture traffic between Japan and the U.S.A. Focused on fashion, Ametora tells the fascinating, intricate story of how Japan - the most style-obsessed country on earth - has beaten America at its own game, in the process established itself as the world's leading nation for curation, simulation, and mutation.

Ametora by W. David Marx traces the craze for American fashion after World War II in Japan, but it quickly becomes larger than that. It's a fascinating window into how fashion, culture and history intersect; you end up learning about several things at once.

W. David Marx's Ametora is a careful, complex, wildly entertaining cultural history of the highest caliber. This book will obviously be of immediate and considerable appeal to Japanophiles, classic-haberdashery connoisseurs, and other assorted fops, but its true and enormous audience ought to be anyone interested in the great hidden mechanisms of international exchange. In an age overrun with hasty jeremiads about the proliferation of global monoculture, Marx has given us quite a lot to reconsider. Ametora is a real pleasure.