W. David Marx

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William David Marx, known professionally as W. David Marx, is an American fashion and culture writer who works and lives in Tokyo, Japan. He is best known for his first book Ametora: How Japan saved American style, published in 2015, through which he slowly developed the acclaim as one of the "leading writers in Japanese menswear."^[1][2][3] He later published Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change in 2022.^[4] Marx also publishes a newsletter titled Culture: An Owner's Manual. Before writing became a larger part of his work-life, Marx worked at Google as part of the Asia-Pacific Team on in Corporate and Product Communication.^[2][5]

Marx was born in Oklahoma to a Jewish father. He lived there for 6 years before moving to Oxford, Mississippi for 3 years, then settled in Pensacola, Florida.^[6][7] His parents met at Vanderbilt University before his father became an academic.

Marx grew up in a traditional, academic, upper-middle class home. In this environment, he grew up wearing what can be described as "American heritage clothing" including brands like Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren, and a uniform consisting of navy blazers, Oxford shirts, and khakis.^[6] He attended an International Baccalaureate school.^[8]

As Marx became a teenager, he became interested in alternative music and culture outside of Pensacola, and therefore moved away from preppy clothing to clothing that better represented his interests.^[6] This interest became significant during his early visits to Japan.^[6]

In the early 90s, Marx's parents began visiting Japan for work.^[7] On returning from their second trip, they brought back souvenirs, including Gundam figurines and manga comics.^[7] Through his exposure to Japanese culture magazines and television, Marx always felt that Japan in the 1990s was "way ahead" of American both culturally as well as technologically.^[7]

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After visiting Japan in late high school through an International Baccalaureate program,^[9] Marx decided to study Japanese in college,^[6] and enrolled in B.A. in East Asian Studies at Harvard University. At Harvard he became a member of the Harvard Lampoon.^[5]

While at college, he was accepted on an internship program at the publisher Kodansha in Tokyo during his freshman summer break in 1998.^[9] The program was for college juniors, however Marx found himself studying Japanese in a "valley between the economic boom in the early 90s and the anime boom of 2004" where learning Chinese was much more popular at Harvard, rending the position much less competitive than the university had anticipated.^[7]

Due to his interest in pop culture, he was placed in a manga magazine office, before moving to a fashion, culture and lifestyle magazine called Hotdog Press, then to a magazine called Checkmate specialising solely in men's fashion.^[7] Through this experience, Marx discovered the growing 90s Japanese streetwear scene. In particular, Marx discovered the brand A Bathing Ape. This was during an era when the streetwear scene in the US was limited only to cities like New York City, where brands such as Supreme were still in their infancy and long before they experienced young people lining up for hours to buy their products.^[10]

After being turned away when first attempting to buy a product from the A Bathing Ape Store, Marx returned the next day to discover over 100 people lining-up in the intense summer heat also waiting to buy an item from the brand.^[2] The whole process total three hours for Marx to finally get his hands on a t-shirt for the equivalent of $40 at the time.^[6][11] Later, Marx discovered that resellers were selling previous years' A Bathing Ape items for over $300.^[6][12] Reflecting on this event, Marx describes it as having "very literally changed the direction of my life. I spent the next decade just obsessed with all the factors that would make this possible: that kids would line up like that and fork over so much money, the reseller economy, the degree the media was directing trends, etc."^[13]

On returning to Harvard, Marx explained his experience to his professors who encouraged him to study this phenomenon and write his senior thesis on the subject. Marx, reflecting on this, considers this choice as the kickstart of his career in professional fashion journalism and writing.^[6]

In his junior year at 20 years old, Marx and one of his friends created the first unofficial webpage for A Bathing Ape, which resulted in him being interviewed by the New York Times in an article titled "Scarcity makes the heart grow fonder" about the growing desire for rare fashion items across the globe and the prevalence of online communities searching for them.^[11][2]

In 2000, Marx returned to Japan to conduct more research on the brand A Bathing Ape, interviewing people in the close circles of the brand's founder Nigo.^[7] Marx's thesis was titled Going ape : "A Bathing Ape" street-wear and the culture of fashion for Japanese youth in the 1990s, for which he was awarded Harvard's "Noma-Reischauer Prize in Japanese Studies in 2001.^[14] The thesis discussed the "specific marketing techniques of those street fashion brands, such as limited edition goods and hidden stores, which at the time seemed counterintuitive but now are very commonly used by brands like Supreme."^[9]

After graduating from Harvard, Marx worked at a bilingual English and Japanese "street culture" magazine in the Lower East Side.^[8] However, he realised that while his Japanese was strong, he would never become fluent if he didn't move to Japan.^[8] With this in mind, at 24 Marx moved to Japan, starting graduate school through a scholarship at Keio University where he studied his Master's degree in Business, specialising in Marketing and Consumer behaviour.^[5]

As Marx's interest in fashion continued, the rise of modern brands in the early 2000s producing traditional menswear such as Beams Plus and Thom Browne helped Marx rediscover his appreciation for the clothes he was brought-up wearing.^[6]

In 2010, Take Ivy, a seminal book of Japanese menswear photography that depicts the attire of Ivy League students from the 1960s was published in English for the first time.^[15] After the book sold successfully in the English speaking market, Marx wrote an article about it. One afternoon, as Marx was in a shoeshiners, a customer walked in and showed him a copy of Take Ivy signed by all four authors. Upon Marx mentioning that he had recently written on the subject, the man introduced himself as an ex-employee of VAN Jacket, a seminal brand in the Ivy movement in Japan.^[7] This allowed Marx to then be introduced to the son of Kensuke Ishizu, the founder of VAN Jacket.^[7] Marx realised that despite the presence of the American fashion community's interest in Japanese Americana, they didn't know the history of why these brands started reproducing Americana.^[7]

After this series of interactions, in 2013 Marx started to write — on spec (without a buyer) — the history of Japan's obsession with this collegiate style of American menswear and the development of Japanese fashion up until modern streetwear.^[3] Marx balanced his full-time job at Google while writing the book, finding time to write in the early hours of the morning before work, and editing on the train. Speaking on the experience of interviewing people for his book, Marx felt as though his position as a white American writer looking to bring the history of Japanese streetwear to America gave him a certain leverage and access that native Japanese journalists were unlikely to have been afforded.^[16]

Ametora: How Japan saved American style was originally published in English and has sold over 50,000 copies.^[7] Marx initially believed the story would already be well-known by the Japanese fashion community;^[2] however, after the book began gaining traction in Japan, it was serialised in the Japanese fashion magazine in Japanese Popeye.^[2] The book is now on its eighth printing in Japan, although the number one non-English market for the book is China, where it has sold 30,000 copies.^[2] The book is retitled Harajuku Cowboy for a Chinese audience, using the literal translation of "jeans" in traditional Chinese which is "cowboy-pants."^[2]

As a product of Marx's book and his rising profile within both American and Japanese fashion circles, he was asked to join the Board of Directors as Outside Director for Nigo's follow-up brand to A Bathing Ape, Human Made.^[2][17]

Marx's inspiration to write his second book came from the realisation that there wasn't "a single book that explains the Grand Mystery of Culture."^[4] With prior interest in and experience analysing cultural trends, Marx quickly arrived at the central thesis of the book: "We cannot unravel the mystery of “how culture changes over time without understanding status."^[4] In its final form, the book investigates "how our cultural tastes, demeanour, speech habits, and fashion choices transmit information to others about who we are and our social status."^[18]

The book received mixed by mainly positive reviews. Kaitlin Phillips for The New York Times noted that "Marx’s first book — an investigation of the Japanese influence on the global fashion industry — succeeded precisely because of his narrow approach." Whilst having some praise for the book, she comments that the scope and "comprehensiveness" of the book "threatens to render “Status and Culture” a dull but effective teaching text" which looses its core "thesis" due to its scope.^[4]

In Eileen G'sell's review for Jacobin, they reflect that Status and Culture "effectively demonstrates, often in fascinating detail, how status signifiers emerge and evolve, and how the drive for status undergirds our gravitation to new styles and cultural trends."^[19] However, the review reflects on how the book "stops short of providing any real sense of how a more egalitarian set of cultural semiotics contributes anything approaching greater equality."

Marx has lived in Tokyo for the best part of two decades.^[20]