The Athletic Body, Symbolism, and Abstraction in Fashion at the Tokyo Olympics, 1964–2020

At its best the Olympic Games is an event that can shape a national narrative, providing a point for historians to use as representative of a time period and a marker of changing eras. Like fashion itself, it can be a visualization of historical transformation. This was certainly the case for Japan in 1964, when the Tokyo 2020 Olympics served as the stage for a new national style, especially visible in the realm of fashion, to represent a nation gloriously reborn and rising after devastating nuclear defeat. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, held in the summer of 2021, also aspired to similar symbolism and was filled with progressive sartorial gestures, yet was constantly beset by a potent, scandal-heavy, counter-narrative that left the hoped-for story of recovery and progress feeling somewhat false and empty. Physically, the Olympic Games is always the gathering site of some of the most extraordinary bodies from around the world, and the issue of clothing them and representing them is always fraught and brimming with questions of whether they represent perfection or grotesquerie. In its celebration of the pictogram, first used in 1964, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics foregrounded fashion's pull toward the perfect abstraction of the human body to symbolize the perfection and imperfection that is the Olympic Games and the Japanese national story.

The 1964 Olympics was a clear marker of a new period in Japanese history, concurrent with the launch of the first shinkansen, or bullet train, and the first live international television broadcast using a geostationary satellite, signaling Japan's rising leadership in consumer technology and an economic miracle well underway. Tange Kenzō's Yoyogi National Gymnasium also represented an emerging and confident expression of Japanese modernism in architecture, and although many of the sites were the same as the cancelled 1940 Olympics, their repurposing represented the conversion of social consciousness from war to economic growth.¹ Sakai Yoshinori, who lit the Olympic flame in 1964, was born in Hiroshima on the day of the atomic bombing, August

8.1.

Dancers perform a pictogram of Olympic sports during the Opening Ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics at Olympic Stadium on July 23, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.

6, 1945, and was chosen to symbolize Japan's postwar reconstruction and peace. The fashion of the 1964 games was also symbolic of a new era underway. In Rome 1960, the Japanese team had worn all-white suits, but for Tokyo, Ishizu Kensuke, founder of the brand VAN, was chosen to design the uniforms. The design featured bright red blazers with gold buttons, in the emerging Ivy style. Ivy, derived from Ivy League students in east coast America was both a subtle and yet also showy style, with an old-money logic of casualizing some elements and peacocking others, mostly playing with the norms of suiting.² Department stores, which had refused to stock the flashy VAN blazers before the games, suddenly rushed to order them. It was a significant moment in the acceptance of the Ivy style, which VAN and magazines like Mens Club and Heibon Punch promoted, but more importantly it was a legitimization that men were now socially sanctioned to care about their appearance and fashion after the long period of very plain suiting after the war.³ Ivy was the inspired style through which to do this, as its stress on rules and details made it close to technical "masculine" hobbies, such as cars and sports, and less susceptible to being belittled as a "feminine" pursuit.⁴ The 1964 Olympics also sanctioned a burgeoning youth fashion, distinct from adult fashion via sportiness. In the 1950s, there was no such thing as youth fashion in Japan; department stores had children's sections, and adult women's and men's sections, but nothing aimed at the period in between. Stores did not believe they could sell to young people, who would not have the money to devote to clothes. The Olympics was a moment that moved toward...