Style Resume Saito Hisao #04

The men's fashion vocational school was boring because the students there were uncool. Most of the students were the sons of tailors from the countryside, but I made some friends there. I happened to have two friends from Ginza. So I would go to school in the morning and ask the serious guys to take my place, then go swimming with my friends, or go to the movies, or hang out at Futaba-ya Shoe Store or Iena Bookstore, which sells foreign books, in Ginza. That's how I spent my days.

I learned about clothes from Western books by looking at their visuals. I often went to those stores and read them, so I had the shirt collars, trousers' hem widths and lengths memorized. Then I realized that this was the "real thing" and not VAN. But it was hard to get clothes like that.

In 1966, the year I graduated, I went to Hawaii with Oguri for about six months, and also spent a week in LA during that time. All the young people at that time were hippies. Barefoot, long hair, T-shirts, boot-cut clothes - the "Ivy fashion" we knew was only worn by older people. That was the conclusive proof. The "Ivy" that was so popular in Japan was a lie. Around the same time, I also discovered the appeal of French and other European fashions through foreign books and movies. "French fashion is completely different from ours!" I thought.