In May of 2008, the style blogger Michael Williams posted a few dozen scans of an obscure 1965 Japanese photo collection called “Take Ivy” to his Web site, “A Continuous Lean.” The images documented a golden age of Ivy League campus life—young American men strolling across the quad, eating hot dogs in dining halls, and studying for finals in libraries. Most importantly, the students dressed in the pinnacle of classic Ivy League style: madras cotton blazers, oxford-cloth button-down shirts, khaki Bermuda shorts, and patinaed penny loafers.

The photos went viral and, two years later, the Brooklyn publisher powerHouse released “Take Ivy” for the first time in English. The book sold over fifty thousand copies worldwide and helped usher in a wave of neo-Ivy style. Ralph Lauren and J. Crew stores proudly displayed copies of “Take Ivy” on their shelves, while magazine editors and retailers championed looks taken straight from the photos. Yet even at the height of “Take Ivy” mania, few asked why exactly a group of Japanese men travelled to Ivy League universities in 1965 to make a photo collection of campus style.

Perhaps this is because the Japanese reverence for Americana has become expected. The Japanese fashion conglomerate Onward Kashiyama bought up the classic Ivy brand J. Press, in 1986, and it was Japanese companies that first made reproductions of vintage jeans with antiquated selvedge denim. In reality, “Take Ivy” was a radical endeavor for nineteen-sixties Japan—a risky business venture intended to challenge the conventions of how men dress. Japanese fashion is known today for the visionary work of brands like Comme des Garçons and Undercover, but fifty years ago, when the original edition of “Take Ivy” hit shelves in Tokyo, fashion was far from a point of national pride. It was a matter for law enforcement.

On two muggy Saturday nights in September of 1964, plainclothes detectives descended upon Tokyo’s upscale Ginza neighborhood to arrest a group of teen-agers known as the Miyuki Tribe. The young women wore handkerchiefs on their heads and long summery dresses with ribbons on the back. But the young men’s outfits were items that most Japanese had never seen before: shirts made from thick wrinkled oxford cloth with buttons on the collar, three-button madras jackets, shrunken chino pants, and leather shoes with intricate broguing. This new fashion style was called aibii—from the English word “Ivy.”

To an American, these Japanese teens would have looked like clean-cut Princeton summer-school students. But the Tokyo police lacked this reference, and saw the Tribe’s costume as an affront to traditional mores. High-school and college students were supposed to live in staid black wool school uniforms, and then don equally staid business suits upon graduation. Few men in the country dared to go beyond a dark-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, and plain black shoes. Only unrepentant rebels experimented with American looks like Hawaiian shirts and MacArthur sunglasses. The Tokyo authorities worried that the teens’ Ivy clothing would offend the foreign tourists visiting Japan during the Olympics that year—a madras menace ruining the country’s first moment in the global spotlight after the Second World War. During the September raids, the police searched the Miyuki Tribe for hidden cigarettes or other contraband, loaded offenders into armored police buses normally used to detain political protesters, and sent them off to the local jail.

At the time, the police did not realize that the members of the Miyuki Tribe were early harbingers of a fashion that would sweep Japan over the next few years. Their “Ivy” clothing came from a brand called VAN Jacket, whose founder, Kensuke Ishizu, hoped to make Japan’s first clothing specifically for young men. He toiled for a decade trying to sell ready-to-wear in the menswear market, but older, wealthy men would not give up their tailors. Ishizu decided to target younger customers instead, but all the contemporary trends, whether aggressive Hollywood one-button jacket styles or V-shaped silhouettes from Europe, looked sinister on the backs of college students. During a 1959 world tour, Ishizu took the train from New York to Princeton University, where he found the perfect look for Japanese teens. The students’ tweed jackets, striped ties, oxford button-down shirts, and khaki pants had a youthful flair while still looking respectable to adults. Ivy clothing was also a good investment for the impoverished Japanese postwar consumer: durable, functional, traditional, and in easy-to-clean natural materials.

Two years later, Ishizu appointed his twenty-six-year-old son, Shōsuke, head of VAN Jacket’s planning division, and tasked him with starting production on Ivy-inspired clothes. Shōsuke knew little about Ivy, so he hired his friend and Japan’s most rabid Ivy fan, the twenty-seven-year-old Toshiyuki Kurosu. In the late nineteen-fifties, Kurosu had made his own Ivy-styled suits through local tailors, and founded a social club, the Traditional Ivy Leaguers, to celebrate East Coast prep style. VAN Jacket offered its first full Ivy line in 1963. A year later, Japan’s first weekly life-style magazine for youth, Heibon Punch, put Ivy League style and VAN Jacket in front of millions of middle-class kids. And when those teens started hanging around the streets in their new VAN duds they became the Miyuki Tribe the police worried so much about.

After the arrests in September, 1964, VAN realized that it did not just need to sell Ivy but define Ivy for everyone in Japan—before the teens being hauled away in police buses did it themselves. While brainstorming ways to improve the image of Ivy League clothing in Japan, Shōsuke and Kurosu threw out an ambitious idea: make a film of actual Ivy League students. Kurosu says today, “The image of Ivy had deteriorated with the Miyuki Tribe, so we wanted to show that the real Ivy students were much better dressed than the kids in Ginza.” The cost, however, would be staggering. Shōsuke and Kurosu did some rough calculations and realized they needed around ten million yen (the equivalent today of two hundred thousand dollars) to make a film of the eight Ivy League campuses. Fortunately, Ishizu, the VAN boss, loved nothing more than big, audacious ideas, and he promptly allocated the money for the project.

To shoot the film, Kurosu and Shōsuke chose a young, Sorbonne-trained director named Kyō Ozawa, who brought along a three-person crew. They also enlisted Hajime “Paul” Hasegawa from VAN’s promotion department, who had studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was VAN’s sole fluent English speaker. And, at the last minute, VAN decided to bring along a still photographer, the thirty-four-year-old Teruyoshi Hayashida. Kurosu told Hayashida he could shoot whatever he wanted as long as he did not get in the way of the film.

On May 23, 1965, the eight-person team boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight to Boston. During the voyage, Shōsuke fretted over the contents of his luggage: stacks and stacks of yen notes required to fund the filming. Japan’s strict currency controls prevented travellers from taking more than five hundred dollars out of the country, but the Ivy film would cost more than four hundred times more. Production started at Harvard University. After a decade of obsession around the Ivy League, Kurosu thought that Harvard Yard looked exactly as he had imagined. So he waited for the students to appear in their signature look: three-button jackets, pants with a strap on the back, white oxford button-down collar shirts, regimental ties, and wingtips.

Yet the first students to exit their dorms that Monday morning slumped into view wearing frayed cutoff shorts and decaying flip-flop sandals. Kurosu thought, maybe these were the class derelicts. But then the next group appeared, and they looked just as sloppy. Kurosu remembers, “I was shocked at how dressed-down they were—actually, it was absolute despair.” Footage of students in T-shirts and cutoff pants would not convince anyone in Japan to rethink Ivy style. Before they left Japan, Hasegawa had told Kurosu, “Jacket and ties were for Sunday chapel, the occasional date, or when you wanted to impress someone,” but Kurosu refused to believe him. Now, he had certainly squandered VAN’s war chest on a misunderstanding of American campus style.