June Ambrose: ‘Cultural appropriation is the best form of flattery’

“Style is to fashion what lyrics are to music, because style’s a symphony.”

June Ambrose, the woman who coined that insight, sits sipping matcha in a posh restaurant on the 31st floor of the Toranomon Edition hotel. A quick scan of this exclusive establishment reveals the casually privileged folk you’d expect to see in such a place, but then your eyes are drawn, even seized by Ambrose.

It’s not just her fashion sense highlighted by her signature hat game. The thing you first notice about Ambrose, even from across a crowded cafe, is there’s a captivating spirit to her flair that is distinctly a product of New York’s concrete jungle where dreams are made.

Ambrose, who has been Jay-Z’s designated “style architect” since the billionaire started Roc-A-Fella Records back in 1994, has worn more hats, blazed more trails, bridged more cultural gaps and changed more narratives than your average person could do in several lifetimes. Her integral role in shaping and innovating global hip-hop fashion and taking streetwear from New York subways to the runways of Paris and Milan is documented and well-respected. The NAACP even acknowledged Ambrose’s excellence in creative design and pioneering work in the fashion industry with its coveted Vanguard Award last month.

The list of artists Ambrose has worked with in her 30-plus years styling and designing is long and distinguished, and many of the music videos she has been the creative force behind are now remembered as vividly as the songs they accompanied: Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See,” the “ghetto fabulous” get-ups worn by Puff and Mase in The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems,” and the inflatable patent leather and vinyl ensemble Missy Elliot flaunted in “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).”

And when Ambrose wasn’t costuming and styling over 200 music videos, she creatively directed Puma’s return to New York Fashion Week by putting the famous footwear and apparel company on WNBA stars, breaking new ground with the first women’s basketball collection.

One of Jay’s most renowned lyrics is: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!” It wouldn’t surprise me if his exposure to Ambrose over the three decades they’ve collaborated inspired it.

Ambrose came to Japan with Jay-Z to knock out a few days of press for his newly launched Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades Champagne. Jay left when he was done with his promotional tasks, but Ambrose stuck around for another week. She says she had unfinished business with Japan.

“There was more I needed to explore here, so much to unpack,” she says. “I need to establish relationships, build partnerships and become more intentional like Virgil (Abloh, the late founder of Pyrex Vision and Off-White) and Pharrell (music producer and designer) were. And like Chris Gibbs with Union LA is doing, opening stores in Tokyo and Osaka, forging fashionable relationships between America and Japan.”

During her trip, Ambrose made the rounds, politicking with some of Japan’s fashion flamethrowers and notable editors. Her Instagram feed is a veritable who’s who of trendsetters who’ve cut their teeth here: Verdy (Girls Don’t Cry), Hiroshi Fujiwara (fragment design), Yoon (Ambush) and Ambrose’s design crush, Chitose Abe (Sacai).

“Things have changed in Japan from the last time I was here 12 years ago — I can see a difference in diversity and inclusion, and it is mind-blowing,” Ambrose says “I’d love to build and partner up and do some things here, even teach some classes about style and fashion, about my work with American boy bands, how that’s influenced K-pop.”

Is the inverse true, though? Has Japanese culture influenced Ambrose’s work at all?

“I’ve always been fascinated with Japanese anime,” she says. “Remember ‘Akira’ back in the 1980s? That’s one of the movies I loved and studied. Japan, to me, is very future-progressive, and in the work I’ve done, like with Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot, I’ve always taken a future-progressive, Japanese approach to the style. And you think about Comme des Garcons (a Japanese fashion label founded by Rei Kawakubo) and their approach to designing men’s fashion for women.

“That kind of rebellion and disruption is how I approach hip-hop culture. Breaking the rules and not falling in line with what they think it should look like. It’s about bending, reinterpreting and reimagining some cultural attributes — whether we’re talking kimono sleeves or turning Japanese tapestry fabrics into something like a bomber jacket.”

I mention to Ambrose that multiculturalism is rising in Japan as the country begins to recognize its growing diversity, particularly among its biracial citizenry. Naomi Osaka and Rui Hachimura are the most recognizable faces, but there’s also Miss Universe winner Ariana Miyamoto, the gold medal-winning judoka Aaron Wolf, professional baseball player Lars Nootbaar and many more.

A lot is going on, and I ask if Ambrose has any thoughts on how that type of societal change might affect fashion.

“At the beginning of my career, the conversation I was having was: How do I forge high fashion with hip-hop culture?” she says. “Make no mistake — high fashion was affected by what was happening in street culture. But they hadn’t gotten married yet, right? It took some time.

“Now, look at the front row at fashion shows; you have athletes, rappers … the whole thing has changed. I think that’s what’s happening in Japan now, too. You can see the impact of hip-hop culture on Japan over many years. It’s not new. But I think what is going to be new is the building of relationships in the fashion industry between American brands and Japanese brands. You’ll start to see many street brands that are doing well in the U.S. begin to launch here.”

Apropos of the hip-hop lifestyle, Ambrose asks for my take on the Japanese version of street culture. I tell her I’ve always thought it was more cosplay than culture here. From my interactions with Japanese people here, many haven’t visited these sources of hip-hop culture. Most of their information on it comes from Japanese sources and media, and it’s mostly derivative at best. In fact, a lot of people have deemed it cultural appropriation.

Of course, Ambrose comes back with a response that looks beyond the here and now.

“Cultural appropriation, to me, is the best form of flattery,” she says. “People complain about it, but imitation has always been flattery. What needs to happen alongside that is there needs to be some context. (Japanese people) need to acknowledge where it came from and pay homage to that. Do that, and it becomes fair game. As long as they say, ‘I was inspired by (so-and-so,)’ You know? Show some respect. Don’t act like this is something that you’ve lived! Because then it becomes, you know, a little weird.”

Ambrose then asks, “Was hip-hop’s 50th anniversary celebrated here?”

I think about all the Stateside celebrations back in 2023 to commemorate the birth of hip-hop, and how the date predictably flew by in Japan without notice. I start to grin, and Ambrose cackles.

“Well, that’s a problem,” she says. “If (Japanese people) can’t acknowledge that there’s been 50 years since the birth of hip-hop, then they probably don’t know what it is. Then no wonder hip-hop, or rather hip-pop, is just cosplay.”

In her time in Japan, Ambrose still feels she was able to get a new measure of the people and the culture.

“I love to be intentional in everything I do, and you can see that is the same mindset of the Japanese people,” she says. “Like the hospitality and the way it caters to foreigners — I feel this is very indicative of the culture. They make you wanna stay!”