W. David Marx: Fashion Is Bigger Than Ever — but Worse at Rewarding Invention

The Business of Fashion Podcast

In this episode of the Business of Fashion Podcast, Imran Amed revisits his first trip to Tokyo in 2007 with W. David Marx, a key early contributo

Key takeaways

• Japan pioneered key fashion movements before they spread globally, including luxury as a middle-class product and the cultural significance of streetwear.

Main topics

• The evolution of Japanese fashion culture
• Luxury consumption trends in Japan

Notable quotes

"There is a lot of culture but it is mostly entertainment, it is money making, and it is politics. And there's a blank space where art for art's sake and what I call creative invention used to be."

Conclusion

W. David Marx argues that while fashion and culture have never been more visible or commercially driven, there is a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, September 4th. In the summer of 2007, I landed in Tokyo for the very first time. A young American writer named W. David Marks took me on a menswear tour of the city's back streets in Shibuya and Harajuku. That trip would eventually lead David to become BOF's very first external contributor, that is, the first person to write for BOF apart from me. Nearly 20 years on, David is still in Tokyo, watching a city that has experienced three of fashion's biggest shifts before anywhere else. Luxury as a middle-class product, the rise and now retreat of streetwear, and menswear as a global obsession. Speaker 1 (0:53) David is the author of three books on Japanese and global culture. The first, Amatora, is about how Japan absorbed and then improved American style. The most recent, Blank Space, is a cultural history of the 21st century, arguing that something has gone missing from the way we make culture today. And so the book is 2001 to 2025 in my... synthesis and summary of those 25 years is that there is a lot of culture but it is mostly entertainment, it is money making, and it is politics. And there's a blank space where art for art's sake and what I call creative invention used to be. And there's just a lot less of it and even if there's not less of it in total, relatively there's more creative activity than ever before. Speaker 1 (1:46) But there's fewer people who are interested in the kind of creativity that pushes the form forward. I sat down with David in Tokyo this past week to discuss all of this and more in what is a fascinating conversation about the state of global culture and global fashion today and how Japan's place in it has changed. Here's W. David Marks on the BOF podcast. David. Hello. Welcome to the BOF podcast. Welcome to Tokyo. Thank you. I was thinking back to my first ever trip to Tokyo, which was... Sometime in the summer of 2007. And somehow you and I got in touch. I don't remember how. I think you were at some sort of conference or something and my boss was standing behind you and you guys started talking and he came back and was like, you got to check this out, Business of Fashion, and then I got in touch with you. I think it was something like that. Speaker 1 (2:50) Tokyo might be one of the most exciting but very complicated cities to navigate as a first timer because there's so much to see. But I do remember... You were you took me on a tour like a menswear tour of Tokyo. Do you back at that time? Do you remember where? You might have taken me it was probably around Shibuya and The back streets of Motsando and yeah, who in that that area that was still I think where most fashion was happening and It was also this is pre tourism Of any scale. Yeah, it's also pre Google Maps And you kind of had to know where things were. So if you were in a Motsan, or Harajuku at that point, it was mostly Japanese shoppers. I was just in Harajuku last week and I would be shocked to see a single Japanese person on the streets. So it's really changed in the last 20 years. Film Courageousness Speaker 1 (3:54) first arrived here and why? Give us a little bit about the background story because I mean back when I met you in 2007 as you said you'd only been here for four years I guess you know you had no idea then that you'd end up staying here for 20 years but what first brought you here and like what have you been doing since you got here and why have you chosen to stay? So I when I was 17 through a homestay sister city connection program of Pensacola, Florida, where I'm from, which is not anywhere. It's Panhandle, Florida. It's not Miami. It's about 11 hours by car from Miami. That city had a city connection with a small town in Japan that I went for three weeks before my senior year of high school and decided I was going to study Japanese in college. So when I went to university, I started studying Japanese. Speaker 1 (4:48) And I was very lucky to do this program that took me to Japan for three months on a work internship freshman year. It was all paid for. And through that, I was never interested in fashion in any sense. Like I'd grown up on preppy clothing that I would never have considered fashion at all. But they didn't have fashion in Pensacola? No, I mean, the South, you think about it now, I think from the perspective of how broad the term fashion is, if you looked at the South, the South was incredibly preppy. Everyone's wearing polo or off-roar. Speaker 1 (5:17) Everyone's in bright mattress. The style was there, just no one thought about it as fashion. And I just remember in the 90s, MTV, I watched so much MTV and then House of Style would come on with Cindy Crawford and I would change the channel because it was like, this had nothing to do with me. It's all the way in New York. So when I showed up in Tokyo, it was like, why is everybody so incredibly well-dressed? And it wasn't just that everyone was wearing designer brands, but... Speaker 1 (5:42) street fashion was really at its peak and that hadn't happened in the US yet and so everyone's wearing like the perfect fit t-shirt logo tee with salvaged denim and the best sneakers and it's like what is this? And even as someone who didn't grow up even thinking about fashion that was apparent to you? Obvious that everyone dressed immaculately. Wow. So first I was trying to figure out what was going on there and then I was into this musician Cornelius who's Japanese who Cornelius got his name from Planet of the Apes the movie. And so I was looking through a magazine and I saw a t-shirt with a Planet of the Apes ape face on it which was a bathing ape and I said I want this t-shirt. So I went to the store and it was it just I realize now that the store had just reopened with Wonderwall Masamichi Katayama's design. So it's this beautiful Speaker 1 (6:38) underground store and you went in and it was an hour wait to get in the store and then a two-hour wait to like buy a product and leave and it was so inefficient and the whole culture of it was so fascinating that when I got back to college I was not only interested in the brand itself just as a fan and I was like I did like a fan page for bathing aid because nobody had websites at that point Speaker 1 (7:02) And then at the same time, my professors were like, you should study this. Like, this is actually a useful phenomenon to study. So I got very into what I guess you would call consumer behavior, trying to figure out why it is that in Japan, kids were so into fashion, why they were willing to wait three hours to buy a t-shirt, reseller markets, why things become more expensive over time. So when I got back, I was very interested in that and then eventually came to Japan to get a master's degree in marketing and consumer behavior, trying to... Speaker 1 (7:30) to study this more seriously. And then just my career prospects were better in Japan, leaving a Japanese university. And I've just had a lot to do since I've been here. So since I've been here, I've written three books. And then to subsidize my book writing, I have full-time jobs. And I worked at Google for a very long time doing Asia Pacific communications, which was great and really taught me a lot about tech in that world. And after leaving that, I started a position as an independent director for Human Made. So I'd written my thesis on Nego and Baiting Ape and then was invited to be on the board, which felt very full circle. I think after that trip, I think it got you to start writing for BOF. You were actually the first non-me person, i.e. the first new contributor to write for BOF. Speaker 1 (8:25) And there was so much happening here that I think people in the Western part of the fashion industry were trying to understand because Japan had been through this massive boom. from a luxury perspective, it had been so critical to the luxury market, but around that time in 2007, 2008, obviously with the financial crisis, like everything kind of started to change. What were the reasons for the shift from Japan being this kind of critical engine for luxury fashion? to what it is now, which is still an important market, largely, as you said, driven by tourist spend. What caused that change? First, you have to go back to the 70s because some people started getting very, very rich and they could go overseas for the first time. And when they went to Paris, there were these guides that said, here are the top 10 things to buy as souvenirs. And Louis Vuitton was on the top of that list. And so... Speaker 1 (9:28) The interest in luxury goods became very attached to showing off that you went overseas and you were sophisticated to know the cool brands. And then at some point, Louis Vuitton had more shops in Japan than they did in France, I think very quickly in the early 80s. So the whole country as the whole country got richer, especially in the 80s and the yen got very strong and people could buy things from overseas. Everyone started thinking about luxury goods as part of their life. I don't want to say everyone, but a huge majority of people, middle class people, started thinking about luxury goods in a way that I think took until the 21st century for places like the US for that to happen. And so by the end of the 20th century, young people in particular were just spending all this money on really, really high-end fashion in a way that it just made no sense anywhere else. Speaker 1 (10:20) And then the economy, because it started going down, consumer spending started dropping at the end of the 90s. By the 21st century, it started shifting where everyone still wanted luxury goods, but they couldn't afford the apparel anymore. They would just buy a single bag. But the brands did really well on the bags. And then at some point, the bags became a lot expensive because consumer spending started dropping even more. And then it started shifting. But just the base was so big. Speaker 1 (10:46) from the beginning that the fashion market here was so much more developed and complicated and sophisticated. And you had people like Comme des Garcons who were always pushing the boundaries of what retail was. And so you that kind of inspired other brands to be really innovative with retail. And so you had some of the coolest stores. You had the biggest flagships. I think the brands are pretty smart about knowing that Japan would be the anchor for Asia eventually. And so Omotsando and all these places started to really decline. Speaker 1 (11:15) when you were here and I was very worried about it. And then huge influx of Asian tourists and everything rebounds. And now Japan has this incredible retail market, but it's mostly for inbound tourism. It's not for domestic Japanese shoppers. My first book, Amatora, which was about the Japanese importation of Western clothing and then the exportation of, there were improved versions of it. That... Book when it came out everyone was like, why would you write something so niche who cares about menswear who cares about? Japanese fashion so that was 2015 and the book you know got good reviews and Speaker 1 (11:57) It had some momentum, but really, you know, in the last couple of years, it's sold even better than when it came out. And it's because just more people are interested in menswear. The people who get interested in menswear immediately are interested in Japanese brands. If you get interested in Japanese brands, you start asking the question, like, why? Why do these brands make such great clothing? And someone will inevitably tell them, oh, you know, there's a book about that. But when I wrote it, I had no idea that it was going to take on as much momentum as it has. Speaker 1 (12:27) It's so interesting because as you're speaking I'm thinking about the streetwear phenomenon I'm thinking about the luxury phenomenon and I'm thinking about the menswear phenomenon and the intersection of all of those three things and in a way now that you've said all that Japan has kind of been a leading indicator in the world about All of those things like we've seen obviously the first the rise of the luxury brands and luxury market then we saw the rise of menswear and the menswear market and more recently we've seen the explosion of and now the kind of Decline of the streetwear market all of that happened here from Japan first. Why do you think that is? Speaker 1 (13:10) Japan just, the Japanese consumer market just anchored itself to fashion in a way that at least in the US never happened. And in Europe, I think the interest in fashion was always more organic. When I go to Milan, you see just beautifully dressed people, but it doesn't feel like costume. It feels really like these people have dressed like this for a long time and their parents probably dress really well. In Japan, it is more costume in the sense that you took a population of no... Speaker 1 (13:39) no interest or experience in fashion and then the media very clearly gave the instruction on here's how to be fashionable and if you want to be a successful person you have to be fashionable and that just created this very information-rich consumer market which then stimulated all these other people to become manufacturers and designers and it just snowballed from there and amateur kind of looks at that streetwear was something that you could say was invented in the US but it was perfected in Japan. And so I have a quote in Aventura from Paul Middleman who worked at Stussy for a long time. And you know Stussy is probably like the OG streetwear brand but they would come to Japan and not only did Japan save their brand in the sense of the sales when they collapsed in the US really. Speaker 1 (14:27) caught on in Japan. But when they saw Bathing Ape, I think his quote was something like, Bathing Ape, Blue Street, we're out of the fucking water. The scale of it was just so much bigger. The packaging was innovative. The graphics were incredible. The stores were unbelievable. They were just these little shoeboxes in Soho. They were these immaculate neon digitally enhanced stores that Wonderwall was making. And so my latest book, Blank Space, is a cultural history of the 21st century. And