Why Japanese People Dress Better (5 Fashion Tips)

Japanese people dress really well. They looked damn cool back then and they're still one of the best dressed people in the whole world, which isn't easy to admit as a Korean guy who went from looking like this to this. With that said, let's get into the five concepts that make Japanese people dress better so that you can elevate your style just like them. The first Japanese concept you need to understand to elevate your fashion is wabi-sabi. Okay, it's not wasabi, it's wabi-sabi. What is wabi-sabi? Wabi-sabi is the beauty that comes from the natural aging process. Letting things run their course, letting a table just exist for a long time and the table's kind of worn in, kind of rusty, and little chips are missing. There's beauty in that. It's been used and Japanese people put a word to describe the elegance, the beauty that comes from the passage of time. When you dress in a way where it looks like you've been wearing the clothes for a long time, the clothes look like they belong to you. It looks like you lived your life with those clothes. Like if the leather's worn in, it's like he's used it so much. What must he have done in his life to have such worn out clothes? What does this mean in a practical sense? It means go vintage shopping, go buy secondhand stuff, raid your mother and father's closet. If you have older brothers who are giving you clothes, wear their hoodies, try to kind of work in this kind of wabi-sabi idea into your outfit and it's going to elevate your style instantly. Next, it's shokunin, which apparently means this spirit of excellence that goes into making something and the Japanese have it down to a T. They are obsessed with making quality stuff and they've been obsessed since these days when they were making samurai swords and it's just generations upon generations of people that have been making swords that are now dedicating their attention to making the perfect denim, like using really great fabric, making sure like all the stitching is done in the union special way, in the perfect way. This obviously means the attention to detail is crazy and the quality is good. I used to think why would you buy this expensive freaking thing if you could buy the same design and the same thing from like a cheap street like store, right? I used to think that until I actually started wearing some of the higher quality fabrics and then I realized, oh my god, everything's different. The silhouette, the way it fits, the way it lasts, the way you don't get bored of it, the details. If you wear some good quality Japanese stuff, you actually realize, holy crap, I understand why people spend money to buy expensive denim because the way the denim ages after every wash is it ages like fine wine. The way things get worn in in the wabi-sabi way is different if the actual fabric is good. To bring it back to the point, why do Japanese people dress well? Because first of all, the structure of society, the infrastructure of production of clothes is so skilled, it's so high quality and they have this spirit of excellence when it comes to craftsmanship and you can see this in watches as well as clothes as well as everything. Next, the next concept is called amekaji. Amekaji is American casual. Now, for the Americans watching this, what the hell is American casual? It doesn't really mean much to you because it's just like casual wear in America but what the Japanese have done so well historically speaking is they've always been masters at copying and reconstructing things in their own way. When they looked at the war times in the US, first world war, between the second world war, they would see, oh my god, that looks really cool, that's really well made because back in the day in the US, soldiers were the heroes. The government would spend a lot of money and make high quality military clothing and the Japanese would be like, let me try to make those things and make it kind of in my way, in my Japanese way. So, they started taking the denim and started making their own denim, they started making salvage denim and all these kind of things. Now, why does that make them better dress? It just means they always had a sense of the essence of what makes an outfit look good. So, they had an idea, it wasn't just like, okay, I'm just gonna wear whatever and then they just actually tried to make it in the best way possible. The next is city boy. This fashion magazine, lifestyle cultural magazine called Popeye created this term city boy to denote a kind of style of wearing something and it's very minimal, it's very based on a silhouette and this is what I think Japanese people combined with American casual and city boy is really what elevated the style in Japan. Because city boy is basic stuff, it's just basic colors, neutral tones but they really paid attention again to the quality and the silhouette, the way it fit your body and you'll see that in the shape of the pants, in the shape of the top and the combination of the colors and it just looks really good. If you're somebody that wants to kind of experiment with different silhouettes, I think city boy is a good thing to look at and if you want to kind of go more into the tradition of fashion and how sort of this Japanese Asian fashion trends developed, then looking at amekaji, like the Japanese interpretation of American casual clothing is a really good place to start. Next is this concept of ma and what this refers to I hear that this is an aesthetic concept that influences architecture, influences design, influences a lot of things in the Japanese aesthetic from the sound design in Japanese anime to the drawing and of course it would also affect Japanese fashion. It's this idea that you have things but let's appreciate the space in between things, the space to breathe and this ties in perfectly with this idea of minimalism, of not doing too much, of not being excessive which is so prevalent in today's culture of this culture of maximalism, of adding more things. Let me add red and green and flower and leather and all this kind of stuff whereas the Japanese are just like just the pants okay and just the t-shirt and the space in between. Letting blank space just be there, letting there be silence, letting there be some space for the other person that enters the room or watches the anime or looks at your clothes to actually participate in some way and add their imagination into you. So think of it like that, why does modern art work well? Why does Japanese architecture and gardens make you feel so peaceful? Because it's not overloading you with information, you go there, it's empty, there's space and you can put yourself, your thoughts, your imagination into that place and you want to kind of be like that, you want to be like the modern art canvas that people can look upon and be like hmm and feel a bit at ease rather than like whoa like I'm the coolest guy in town, look at all my cool clothes, look at my logos, look at all these freaking bling bling watches and this would be going against the concept of ma which again correct me if I'm wrong Japanese people watching this is clearly a concept that applies to Japanese fashion as well so take these five concepts and that's why Japanese people dress better than you see you next week bye