For decades now, we’ve come to mythologise the bustling streets of Tokyo. The advanced technology and the expertly crafted food of Japan. The visionary animations, comic books and video games. Our cultural gaze has shifted east. Those who have been lucky enough to visit are rarely disappointed.

It also wouldn’t be hyperbole to suggest that the megacity is today the best-dressed place in the world. Harajuku is its youth-cultural hub, where you’ll find everything from sartorial stalwarts such as Beams to the bleeding edge where future fashion and cosplay merge. While Japanese-made denim has become the gold standard for jeans and outerwear. But just the way that people here go about their business every day, showcasing impeccable style, puts it in the same bracket as Milan, Paris and New York when it comes to fashion.

What is perhaps surprising is that much of this understanding and appreciation of fashion is relatively new, especially among men. Up to the end of the 1950s, men wore their work suits to parties and dates. Meanwhile, students wore their traditional gakuran uniform at the weekend. A small group of people set out to change that – to create a culture of personal style – and their greatest tool was the print magazine.

Kensuke Ishizu started his ready-to-wear brand VAN Jacket in 1951. A seasoned entrepreneur, it wasn’t money or manufacturing that proved most difficult, it was a cultural belief that told men it was feminine to have casual clothes. It wasn’t enough to promote his brand, he had to find a way to promote the very idea of personal style.

The answer was Otoko no Fukushoku, Japan’s first men’s ready-to-wear fashion magazine. Launched in 1954, it treated getting dressed as a piece of engineering, with strict instructions on things like when to wear a tie and how your trousers should break on your shoe.

Ishizu, as part of the founding editorial team, likened it to the instructions that come with medicine. Reframing style as a matter of discipline resonated.

As VAN Jacket’s product range pivoted towards the Ivy style – inspired by the clothes American college students wore on campus – so did the magazine, which rebranded as Men’s Club in 1963. Ishizu recruited Toshiyuki Kurosu, who became a regular contributor, laying out rules of the style based on what he saw in Western movies, album covers and his own intuition.

In 1965, Kurosu and the Men’s Club team made a trip to finally see the style on Ivy League campuses themselves. Cameras in hand, they were left disappointed; students had, for the most part, moved on from what Men’s Club called Ivy. The version they had been building, refining and codifying in Japan was more faithful to the ideal than the real thing. While slightly dejected, they gathered enough photos to assemble Take Ivy, the book that is still coveted among prep and Ivy enthusiasts.

Though Men’s Club had overshot its source material, the authority it conveyed changed the way people looked at clothes in Japan. However, despite its impact, the audience was still relatively niche. To reach the rest of the country would require a different magazine entirely.

If Men’s Club codified the Ivy style, Heibon Punch took it to the masses. Launched in 1964, the latter set out to win over young men with articles on music, sports, satirical political commentary and sex. It presented a new level of hedonism and expression. A generation of youth who had only known a post-war Japan were immediately captivated by it.

Amid the mahjong tournament news and film reviews were articles on fashion, focusing on the Ivy style. While it didn’t have the detail of Men’s Club, the lifestyle that Heibon Punch portrayed – where men wore button-down shirts, cruised around in American cars and hung out in jazz bars – made Ivy massively aspirational. By 1966, Heibon Punch was selling a million copies.

Off the back of Heibon Punch’s success, students began to meet in the streets of Ginza, Tokyo, in their VAN Jacket Ivy clothes. Branded the Miyuki zoku, they were seen as delinquents, disrupting the peace and chatting up girls. Ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the police were sent in to disperse the groups, detaining more than 200 kids in penny loafers.

Ishizu held meetings with students and police to try to convey the nature of Ivy as being something based in tradition rather than troublemaking. Eventually, the two sides made peace and the Ivy fanatics returned to the streets. In just a few years, these magazines had given the youth personal style, Ivy a code and earnt VAN Jacket an eyewatering amount of money.

In the 1970s, two rogue editors at Heibon Publishing began experimenting with new titles. Ski Life, a magazine on American ski culture, and Made in USA, essentially a catalogue of American products, were surprisingly popular. The opportunity was clear, and in 1976, Yoshihisa Kinameri and Jirō Ishikawa were asked to produce a new magazine: Popeye.

Popeye showed a different side of the US to Heibon Punch or Men’s Club. The East Coast Ivy style had been replaced by the sporty, outdoor living of the West Coast. Articles were not on matching ties with jackets, but surfing and Frisbee. Shirt recommendations were replaced with pages of sneakers and quarter zips. It was a lighter, more relaxed lifestyle that appealed to the Japan of the tumultuous 1970s.

The magazine was less editorial than its predecessors, aping the catalogue style of Made in USA. Each issue was filled with hundreds of fashion and lifestyle products, including prices and where to buy them. The style was heavily criticised but proved popular with the new generation. For a time, style was no longer about identity, as it had been in the 1960s. Now, it was about consumption.

Men’s Club, Heibon Punch and Popeye each did something distinct: one gave style a code, one gave it desire and one gave it a new direction. Together, across three decades, they turned a country of grey suits into the most closely watched men’s fashion scene in the world.