Men’s Wear, Sports Illustrated, the French magazine Adam, JC Penney and Sears Roebuck catalogs, and the ads in The New Yorker.

In May 1985, Tadashi Yanai opened a large-scale shop for casual basics in Hiroshima called “Unique Clothing Warehouse”—abbreviated as UNIQLO.

The home electronics company Sanyo worked with VAN to create a line of gadgets—the Sanyo Ivy Razor, the Sanyo Ivy Hair Dryer, and the Sanyo Ivy Junior Tape Recorder.

Browsing Popeye no longer requires a trip to Kinokuniya in Manhattan but simply following the magazine’s Instagram account. And the excitement in 2010 over Take Ivy was no momentary fluke: the Japanese photobook is now considered the canonical text for the classic Ivy League look, and perhaps, the fundamental prism for understanding “American”

Magazines like Boon spread the Ōsaka Five brands to the masses by styling their jeans with T-shirts from Ura-Harajuku.

With the success of Take Ivy, VAN ran an integrated sales campaign each season. The most iconic installment came in Spring/Summer 1967—“Cape Cod Spirit”—in which VAN hoped to channel the timeless charm of John F. Kennedy on a yacht. (Although no one at VAN could find Cape Cod on a map.) Next came the Southwestern ranch-chic “Discover America”—a

Hirata got his big break from Gen Tarumi, the owner of popular Tokyo clothing store Hollywood Ranch Market.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, hip-hop lyrics referenced Japanese streetwear brands A Bathing Ape and Evisu as conspicuous accoutrements of a lavish lifestyle. Meanwhile, savvy shoppers in New York’s Soho or London’s West End came to prefer Japanese chain UNIQLO over the Gap.

Hiroki Nakamura’s high-end streetwear line, visvim, has abandoned references to Ivy and American denim and delved instead into ancient folk customs. After obsessing over Heavy Duty items as a teenager, Nakamura was shocked when he moved to Alaska, “I was head-to-toe in American heritage brands—Levi’s 1955, WWII-model, the most rare Red Wing you can