W. David Marx Profile picture
Jan 10, 2022 9 tweets 5 min read Read on X
AMETORA MINI-STORIES #2
Why Japanese Fashion Magazines Look Like Catalogs

One of the most distinctive features of Japanese magazines is their similarity to catalogs: lots and lots of products laid out along with prices and retailers.

The origin is, oddly, the US counterculture.
This Japanese design style began in the mid-1970s, directly inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog — @stewartbrand's hyper-saturated guide to the tools necessary for self-sustainable communities, published from 1968-1972. (Steve Jobs called WEC “Google in paperback form.")
Illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi (L) and editor Jirō Ishikawa (R) were in New York in '69 to report on youth culture, when they came upon the Whole Earth Catalog inside the Doubleday bookstore. Kobayashi couldn't figure out what the WEC *was*, but he brought a copy back to Japan.
After puzzling over the Whole Earth Catalog for years, Kobayashi and Ishikawa finally decided make a "Japanese version." But instead of a semi-philosophical manifesto, they made theirs a mock mail-order catalog of American-made products: clothing, outdoor supplies, tools etc.
They traveled to the U.S. and took photos of three thousand different objects: Madison Avenue repp ties, Pendleton knockabout cardigans, Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Production surfboards, and the generic shovels, rakes, plows, screwdrivers, and pliers that sat in suburban garages.
The resulting 274-page catalog— called the Made in USA catalog — drowned readers in product shots, and included a fifty-six-page reprint of the 1974-1975 Hudson’s Camping Headquarters mailer.

It was a runaway smash hit and sold 150,000 copies.
Bolstered by the success of Made in USA, the same team founded Popeye Magazine and again used the same catalog design from WEC. Popeye's instant success then made the "catalog magazine" format the hot design convention for all consumer goods magazines.
Advertisers loved the catalog format because it directly pushed their products to consumers as legitimized purchases. Consumers loved it because they could learn about hundreds of "legitimate" products and shop for them before even setting foot in a store.
Not only did Made in USA and Popeye create the dominant conventions of Japanese magazine design, but much later inspired American mag Complex, and arguably, fashion blogs. And all of it starts with the Whole Earth Catalog.

(Kobayashi and Ishikawa in 2019)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with W. David Marx

W. David Marx Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @wdavidmarx

Jul 15, 2022
My new book Status and Culture (on sale 8/30) synthesizes what we know about status and social behavior to explain taste, fashion, art, and other common cultural phenomenon.

I thought it would be helpful to list out the classic books for understanding how culture works (1/n): Image
1. Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class

Foundational text for understanding taste as an economic process: namely, the inevitability of New Money engaging in conspicuous consumption. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but his arguments are more nuanced than often portrayed. Image
2. Pierre Bourdieu - Distinction

Very long, with famously convoluted prose, but crucial for understanding the intersection of class and aesthetic preferences, taste and cultural capital. It's a critique of "Kantian aesthetics," so first read up on Kant's theory of taste. Image
Read 20 tweets
Jul 10, 2022
To describe Japanese newspapers and TV as a cartel sounds like conspiracy-thinking, but obviously they're all aware that the "specific group" Abe's assassin felt animosity toward was the Unification Church. They're just coordinating to withhold that information: i.e. a cartel
So what you get in Japan is a "gray market" of information, where the truth goes out to tabloids for informed readers but there's still plausible deniability because they're only "tabloids."

"Tabloid" Shukan Gendai reported the Unification Church angle

news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/6b0e3…
The Internet confuses this old system because Yahoo! news page is one of the most well-read news sites. What's the point of the cartel if readers see the official reports right besides the tabloids?

Withholding available information just reveals the existence of the cartel
Read 6 tweets
Feb 10, 2022
In yesterday's tweet thread about YMO's exotica origins, I skimmed over the electronic sound experimentation that was already brewing in Japan before 1978.

Here is a summary of pre-YMO Japanese electronic sounds. 🧵
In Feb 1974 (months before Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"), Isao Tomita released the Debussy Moog album "Snowflakes Are Dancing," which was a huge hit in the United States.

In 1977 Tomita's programmer Hideki Matsutake helped add electronic elements to Akiko Yano's second album "Irohanikonpeitō," which has perhaps the greatest album cover of all time.

Read 6 tweets
Feb 9, 2022
How A Single Bad Drug Trip Led to Japanese Technopop 🧵

In the early 1970s, bassist Haruomi Hosono of the band Happy End was jamming with his friends at a Tokyo studio, when someone passed around a joint. Hosono thought it would be very cool to take a double-sized hit.
The joint was laced or tainted, and Hosono went into a serious panic attack. He thought he was going to die and begged his friends to call an ambulance. They told him to chill out.

Hosono managed to get home the next day, but the panic attacks started again and wouldn't go away.
To heal himself, Hosono read New Age tome "The Human Miracle: Transcendent Psychology" and listened exclusively to birdsong and other tranquil music. In particular he relied on exotica musician Martin Denny's "jungle sound" records, which he knew from post-war AM radio.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 17, 2022
AMETORA MINI-STORIES #3 🧵
Why Japanese Teenage Delinquents are Called Yankii

In Japanese, the word used for working-class teenage delinquents is "yankii" (ヤンキー), which seems to derive from Yankee.

But stereotypical yankii style doesn't look very American... so why yankii?
The yankii fit the common pattern of working-class subcultures (like Japanese Teddy Boys). They're a major part of post-war youth culture, especially as part of bōsōzoku biker gangs, and show up a lot in manga, films, and TV, such as Be-Bop High-School or baseball film Rookies.
Typical yankii style is a fluffy permed pompadour slicked back with pomade (called a "regent"), a thin mustache, shaved eyebrows, angular sunglasses. They wear modified school uniforms with baggy pants, or, if bikers, jumpsuits often with Japanese imperialist slogans.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 18, 2019
Japanese rock-and-roller Yuya Uchida 内田裕也 (1939-2019) has died. He was arguably more famous for his album cover art and bombastic personality than for any of his actual music.
Yuya's legacy is interesting as a sort of alternative history. In the late 1960s, there was a big debate between Yuya and the band Happy End about the proper direction of Japanese rock.
Yuya said the lyrics had to be in English, with the idea that the Japanese would have to sing the language of Western rock to appeal to the West.

Happy End called for Japanese lyrics that spoke to a Japanese experience.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(