Tiffany Monica Louie - Week 3 - Japan

Above: An outfit from fashion designer Takashi Tetano's Worker's brand 2016 Spring Summer collection

Part of Japan’s national aesthetics can be described as a process of “copy-cat modernity” - the topic of our class discussion for this island nation.  After World War II, the United States’s influence on Japan was multi-fold that included food and fashion.  The interview introduction titled “How American Style Fueled Postwar Youth Fashion in Japan” by Chantal Fernandez explains how the Japanese were able to successfully take existing fashion from the United States and incorporate that into the fashion and trends of the every-day wear of the middle class.  After the war, people of Japan were still used to having tailor-made clothing, so fashion designer Kensuke Ishizu envisioned a new fashion trend for the next generation - the preppy style he had seen while visiting Princeton.  His production of outfits that replicated the exact styles of American name brand Brooks Brothers represented a new fashion aesthetic for Japan that essentially “...set the pattern on how the country would import, consume and modify American fashion for the next fifty years.”  What Ishizu did was took what was existing already in another country, and rebranded that fashion trend to appeal to the Japanese youth.  

Another example of “copy-cat modernity” in Japan is through its food.  Tofu is a soybean food product with origins from China that is consumed in many Asian countries, but is closely associated with Japanese cuisine with food such as agedashi dofu and tamago-dofu. When the tofu-making process was introduced in Japan, the Japanese took this process and pretty much made it better - through rebranding strategies like using different beans and methods that are familiar with the Japanese people.

Question: What are some fashion brands that you know of that are not influenced by any other existing fashion trends? Is it even possible to find this? If so, where?

Fernandez, Chantal. "How America Style Fueled Postwar Youth Fashion in Japan." Fashionista. N.p., 02 Dec. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

http://www.tofu-as.com/english/tofu/howto/index.html

http://www.e-workers.net/store/2016sslook.htm

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