W. David Marx: Fashion Is Bigger Than Ever — but Worse at Rewarding Invention

**Imran Amed** (0:04)
Hi, this is Imran Amed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BoF Podcast. It's Friday, September 4th. In the summer of 2007, I landed in Tokyo for the very first time. A young American writer named W. David Marx took me on a menswear tour of the city's back streets in Shibuya and Harajuku. That trip would eventually lead David to become BoF's very first external contributor, that is the first person to write for BoF apart from me.
Nearly 20 years on, David is still in Tokyo, watching a city that has experienced three of fashion's biggest shifts before anywhere else. Luxury as a middle-class product, the rise and now retreat of streetwear, and menswear as a global obsession.
David is the author of three books on Japanese and global culture. The first, Ametora, is about how Japan absorbed and then improved American style. The most recent, Blank Space, is a cultural history of the 21st century, arguing that something has gone missing from the way we make culture today.

**W. David Marx** (1:13)
And so, the book is 2001 to 2025, and my synthesis and summary of those 25 years is that there is a lot of culture, but it is mostly entertainment.
It is money making, and it is politics. And there is a Blank Space where art for art sake and what I call creative invention used to be. And there is just a lot less of it, and even if there is not less of it in total, relatively there is more creative activity than ever before, but there is fewer people who are interested in the kind of creativity that pushes the form forward.

**Imran Amed** (1:52)
I sat down with David in Tokyo this past week, to discuss all of this and more, in what is a fascinating conversation about the state of global culture and global fashion today, and how Japan's place in it has changed. Here's W. David Marx on the BoF Podcast.
David.

**W. David Marx** (2:13)
Hello.

**Imran Amed** (2:14)
Welcome to the BoF Podcast.

**W. David Marx** (2:16)
Welcome to Tokyo.

**Imran Amed** (2:17)
Thank you. I was thinking back to my first ever trip to Tokyo, which was sometime in the summer of 2007

**W. David Marx** (2:33)
Right.

**Imran Amed** (2:34)
Somehow, you and I got in touch. I don't remember how.

**W. David Marx** (2:37)
I think you were at some conference or something, and my boss was standing behind you, and you guys started talking, and he came back and was like, you got to check the site out Business of Fashion, and then I got in touch with you. I think it was something like that.

**Imran Amed** (2:51)
Tokyo might be one of the most exciting, but very complicated cities to navigate as a first-timer because there's so much to see. But I do remember you took me on a tour, like a menswear tour of Tokyo. Back at that time, do you remember where you might have taken me?

**W. David Marx** (3:13)
It was probably around Shibuya and the back streets of Motando, and Harajuku and that area. That was still, I think, where most fashion was happening. And it was also, this is pre-tourism of any scale. Yeah. And it's also pre-Google Maps.

**Imran Amed** (3:31)
Right.

**W. David Marx** (3:32)
And you kind of had to know where things were.
So if you were in a Motando or Harajuku at that point, it was mostly Japanese shoppers. Where if you go, I was just in Harajuku like last week, and I'd be shocked to see a single Japanese person on the streets. So it's really changed in the last 20 years.

**Imran Amed** (3:48)
Okay. So let's go back to when you first arrived here and why.
Give us a little bit about the background story. Because I mean, back when I met you in 2007, as you said, you'd only been here for four years. I guess you had no idea then that you'd end up staying here for 20 years. But what first brought you here and what have you been doing since you got here? Why have you chosen to stay?

**W. David Marx** (4:17)
So when I was 17, through a homestay sister city connection program of Pensacola, Florida, where I'm from, which is not anywhere, it's Panhandle 4, it's not Miami. It's about 11 hours by car from Miami.
That city had a city connection with a small town in Japan that I went for three weeks before my senior year of high school and decided I was going to study Japanese in college. So when I went to university, I started studying Japanese and I was very lucky to do this program that took me to Japan for three months on a work internship, freshman year, that was all paid for. And through that, I was never interested in fashion in any sense, like I'd grown up on preppy clothing that I would never have considered fashion at all.