Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style #
Author W. David MarxDate July 3, 2025Rating 5/5
Due to the nature of my relationship with fashion, it will be hard to give a good review of this book, plus if you are interested in fashion, you’ve probably already seen a lot of really great discussions of the ideas and history outlined in this book. Needless to say, I really loved this book. In lieu of a proper review, I will provide a few trains of thought I had whilst reading this book:
It is quite interesting to see how much I am learning about American culture of the past through a book analyzing the Japanese perspective on it. While I do know about Japanese fashion magazines (and own a few copies of different publications), I didn’t realize that they had origins in various American stylings and cultures (and even our own magazines). I do like a lot of fashion magazines, but for some reason the ones I gravitate to the most are Japanese or French, and not our American counterparts. This book’s analysis of how these magazines came to fruition in Japan I think help me understand where this disconnect comes from.
Side note: I think part of the reason I like certain Japanese and French fashion magazines more than their American counterparts is partly due to a greater focus on celebrity culture in American magazines. This isn’t true everywhere, there are a lot of really good niche fashion magazines out there that are just about fashion and the culture surrounding it, but the most famous American fashion magazines feel like they verge towards “tabloid” in their pursuit of celebrity clothing.
Due to the way that every fashion stylism here is divided into “tribes”, it really makes trend choices in fashion more obviously just a tribe identifier as opposed to a “factual good”. I see a lot of the youth in the current generation of fashion proselytizing wider silhouettes (especially for pants) as being definitively better than slimmer silhouettes, where the opposite was done by the previous fashion generation. Of course, both arguments may have merits on certain claims, but when everything is lined up with different fashion styles and tribes (as it is in this book), it’s very clear to see that these choices are just means of affiliating yourself with a specific tribe. Wearing wider jeans might be more comfortable than wearing slimmer jeans (in this cultural moment), but it does also help you identify yourself as young and as gen-z, which is arguably more important. I may be wrong in this understanding, but as I read more about tribes in this book, some aspects of style there felt similar. I mean, we’re already seeing some young people wearing slim Heidi Slimane like outfits in contrast to the more popular wider silhouettes of this moment, but are these both not just tribes? Neither choice is “right” or “wrong”, they just feel to me like cultural identifiers.
The way in which Japanese youth would fall into these tribes also reminds me of what modern fashion feels like out here in the west. It’s noted in the book that there would be, for example, more people interested in dressing like a California surfer than would actually surf. This feels pretty similar to how modern aesthetics are frequently used to make a person seem apart of an in-group without having to actually participate in the non-aesthetic parts of that group. For instance, a while ago, a lot of people dressed to appear like they lived in a cottage and did subsistence farming, but weren’t actually doing those things. I don’t personally find anything wrong with this, it’s mostly just people trying to find styles and things they’re interested in (and perhaps as a form of escapism), but it’s interesting to see that this isn’t a uniquely modern phenomena.
The afterword is quite interesting and provides some more current input on ametora, as it was written in 2023. The author mentions a lot about the impact of Uniqlo on modern fashion, both internationally, and on the American coasts. I feel like, now in 2025, the impact of Uniqlo is even more massive on at least American fashion, even with its history of labor abuses. Uniqlo appears to be seen as the default for generic clothing that will fit most or any situation, given it’s quality for price dichotomy. It’s really hard to beat Uniqlo, and I can now understand where Uniqlo’s production history and quality would come from, thanks to the history provided in this book. All the same, while I do really appreciate the major impact Uniqlo has had on American and global fashion, I still think it has a long way to go to become a more ideal clothing label. I mentioned earlier Uniqlo’s history of labor abuses, which is of course common among a large number of modern inexpensive clothing retailers, but there is also a question of environmental impact, which is another notable concern with Uniqlo. Of course, there are no silver bullets here on the consumption side of things, the best thing to do is to just not consume more clothes, allowing you to not partake in both the labor exploitation and the environmental exploitation. Regardless, I did really like how the author talked about modern Japanese street wear and Uniqlo in the afterword, it tied together a lot of things that I am at least vaguely aware of at this moment with everything he discussed earlier.