TOKYO, Japan - The crazy kids in Tokyo's  Harajuku neighborhood often give outsiders an impression that Japanese fashion trends appear organically on the street without any industry prodding.

In truth, Japanese fashion magazines still retain an uncanny ability to set seasonal styles on a near-mechanical schedule. Due to industry, media, and consumer coordination unlike anywhere else in the world, Japanese trends change on a dime at the beginning of a season, exactly in the ways delineated by magazines.

This system can be awe-inspiring when things go as Japan's fashion machine intends, but once in a while, the top cannot convince consumers to buy into the template. The most recent example is last year's push for "American traditional" menswear (a la Thom Browne and Band of Outsiders), which fell flat.

With the glowing coverage of these "neo-trad" brands in the Western media over the last few years, Japanese men's fashion magazines like Popeye and Men's Nonno followed the cue and spent the entirety of last autumn advocating American traditional — nicknamed "Ametora" in Japanese.

Magazines were suddenly flush with archival pictures from Ivy League universities in the 1960s, plus photo spreads of cricket sweaters, button-down oxford shirts, bengal stripes, and regimental ties. When spring rolled around, Ametora transformed into seersucker and "cordlaine" suits, boater hats, ribbon belts, and cordovan oxfords with no socks. Popular select shops like United Arrows stocked both autumn and spring based on this aesthetic, hoping for a preppie trickle-down from the high-end segment to the mass youth market.

The streets, however, never really took up American trad en masse. A few wealthy dandies could be seen in Thom Browne and some salarymen picked up shirts and ties at Brooke Brothers Black Fleece, but youth basically avoided any and all permutations on classic Ivy League styles. Even with the famously-inclusive "mixture" layering style of Tokyo, elements of prep style generally did not make it into wardrobes. (Madras check was a notable exception.)

The first barrier for Ametora was the fact that the American brands featured in Japanese magazines as vanguard of the trend — Thom Browne, Band of Outsiders, Adam Kimmel, and 3.1 Phillip Lim— are incredibly expensive in Tokyo thanks to ever-increasing import costs. Already obscenely-priced $50 pairs of athletic socks from Brooks Brothers Black Fleece in the USA somehow become the jaw-dropping ¥15,000 (~$140) in Japan. Contemporary Japanese youth are generally broke and tend to gloss over styles that are impossible to buy.

Pricing is not the whole story, though. There are plenty of American trad knock-offs from Japanese select shops to give kids a cheap way of becoming well-styled clones of 1963 Princeton eating club members.

The core problem with American prep style in Japan is actually more complex, a quirk of the Japanese fashion market's historical development. From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, American and British traditional casual styles — Ivy League and Oxbridge looks — formed the mainstream of Japanese men's fashion. The wealth and sophistication of the 1980s, however, brought European designer wear ("mode") to the mix, which provided a dialectic antithesis to the original Ametora. Even when the 1990s moved away from designer lines to casual urban street fashion, preppie was still too grounded as "non-fashion" to ever elicit real attention from hipster youth.

As suggested by this Japanese site, most Japanese youth simply see American trad as "dad fashion." Stylists and fashion editors may have the confidence to wear re-conceptualized Ivy League styles with a dash of irony, but youth subconsciously see the core elements of the Ametora fashion as too closely resembling the clothes worn by fathers and older salarymen.

("British Traditional" is the industry-wide keyword for AW 2008, and since "British" calls to mind punk rock, Paul Smith, and aristocracy for most Japanese youth, the industry thinks tweed coats and tartan check have a fighting chance in the mass market.)

The moral of the story is that localisation in foreign markets does not just mean "adapting Western looks to local culture." Japan now has a relatively long history of importing Western fashion, and so foreign trends not only have to be new and interesting, but also have to avoid reviving "rejected styles" that remain strong in society. The most important prerequisite to revival is that the original style has faded from view. "American Trad" in Japan, unfortunately, has a very shallow grave.

This brings us back to Japanese fashion magazines' ability to start trends: was the Ametora failure a sign of their waning power? Not exactly. Everyone in the market knew that "American trad" was the proper trend for the season. But consumers decided to avoid it and pick up other micro-trends in its place. No matter how much industry and media coordinate, consumers are still the ultimate arbiters. With no monolithic mega-trends and more fashion diversity, it is easier than ever to say "No."

By W. David Marx, Contributing Editor of The Business of Fashion and Chief Editor of Mekas. Photos courtesy of the June 2008 issue of HUgE and April 1, 2008 issue of Brutus.