Take Ivy
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1. Foreshadowing
Hosted by Avery Trufelman, Articles of Interest is a podcast on fashion and clothing. One of their recent episodes (American Ivy: Chapter 1) featured a book called Take Ivy. I’m not very interested or informed on contemporary fashion or ever-evolving style trends but this episode was eye opening for other reasons.
Take Ivy is intended as a fashion lookbook of Ivy League college style. (The name takes from a jazz record by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Take Five [1959].)
(Originally, the concept was intended to be a film but photography and essays would be easier to reproduce. Let’s focus on the book and its repercussions. Here is the film:)
The book was authored by four contributors: Toshiyuki Kurosu, Teruyoshi Hayashida, Hajime (Paul) Hasegawa, and finally, Shosuke Ishizu, who is the mastermind behind it all. (I’ve also seen Ishizu’s name more frequently as Kenzuke Ishizu.)
These four men were the vanguard of Japanese style in the mid-1900s. These “sartorial style enthusiasts” looked to American Ivy League/collegiate culture as the pinnacle of idealized fashion. They catalogued and documented college-aged (white, affluent) men on campus doing the mundane: riding bikes, reading books, walking between classes, getting lunch from the cafeteria, playing sports on the lawn. Wikipedia calls the subjects “impeccably and distinctively dressed in fine American-made garments.”¹
The final product is less a lookbook and more an anthropological study of culture and post-adolescent (white, affluent) manhood. There are no models in poses of contrapposto. The photographs capture a simplicity of lifestyle wrapped in a highly stylized informality.
Take Ivy announces itself in the preface: “We visited all the institutions in the Ivy League — a group of eight prestigious universities on the East Coast the U.S. — to learn everything about their campuses and the lives of students. Here is a report entitled ‘Everything about the Ivy League’ with photos that our teams of reporters collected during our one-month fact-finding trip.”²
2. Plot twist!
However, disaster struck. The inevitable: time had moved onward; culture had shifted. The book’s preface was not entirely true at all.
The eight-person team arrived in the U.S. in 1965 and were stunned by the dissonance between real Ivy league style and the Japanese understanding of Ivy. The original Ivy style was by now long gone, students in the mid 60s didn’t carry attaché cases or wear saddle shoes. The resplendent sartorial formality of Japan’s Ivy was nowhere to be seen. The crew was dismayed that no students wore the three-piece suits that were supposed to be the de facto Ivy uniform.³
What would their solution be? The goal was to document a natural and unprecedented style and simply take it back to Japan. But there was a radical shift in expectations. Ishizu would riposte. The answer was simple: Where documentation was not possible, replace with manufacture.
On the podcast, Trufelman says, “Take Ivy […] was made as a form of propaganda. For the company that published this book, there were very high stakes to make the Japanese public think that Americans dress this way — which […] some Americans used to dress this way. But it was once a very small, very elite world. And that style should have died out or disappeared entirely at various points in history.”³
3. The Revelation
Take Ivy pursued a vision of America that did not exist, at least as it was perceived. But the book was published in Japan, institutionalizing a particular vision of reality. The book was later exported to America where it became a fashion bible.
J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and L. L. Bean are cited as being built on the back of the styling and art direction of Take Ivy. Eventually brands like Vineyard Vines, Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch would emerge as second tier heirs to the Ivy style.
But the point is… it was all manufactured.
Roland Barthes writes on mythology — “and by ‘myth’ [Barthes] means […] not ‘classical’ mythology so much as the complex system of images and beliefs which a society constructs in order to sustain and authenticate its sense of its own being: i.e. the very fabric of its system of ‘meaning’ (emphasis added).”⁴
If you thought culture could not be manufactured, this book corrects that presumption. Culture is not an ethereal and chaotic idea-entity with no apparent driver at the wheel. This is intentional staged culture export. The scaffolding of our current fashion sensibilities are someone else’s proposition of an unreality turned reality — a kayfabe of fashion. Fashion is always a costume but in this case—Kenzuke Ishizu’s Take Ivy—it has turned the idea of style into cultural cosplay.
“The so-called objective world,” says Terence Hawkes, “does not exist out there but is manufactured by us within and through our total pattern of behavior.”⁵
In short: Our reality is fabricated. Our first hand experiences are second hand design.
4. Epilogue
An English translation of Take Ivy did not publish until 2010 (45 years after its original Japanese publication), where it was promptly sold in J. Crew stores (see header image).
Phenomenally, Take Ivy exists (almost) in its entirely on Issuu. Take a gander here. Or buy a copy from the publisher.
W. David Marx wrote about all of this and Ishizu’s storied life in his book, Ametora (2015).
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Ivy
- Ishizu, S., Kurosu, T., Hasegawa, H., Hayashida, T. (2010). Take Ivy. Powerhouse Books.
- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/american-ivy/transcript
- T. Hawkes. (1977). Structuralism and Semiotics. University of California Press.
- ibid.
