Achievement in textile arts and kimono decoration traced from origins in legendary times through emergence into the modern era.

With dozens of photographs and expertly written text, this Japanese clothing book is the authoritative guide on the kimono. Japanese Costume invites the reader to explore the world of Japan’s textile arts and costume decoration—from its origins in legendary times, through its brilliant development in the intervening centuries, to its emergence into the modern era. The book which is the first in English to present the full sweep of Japanese achievement in the costume arts, is essential the story of the kimono and its evolution. The text is accompanied by a generous selection of fine illustrations and photographs: 54 in full color, 119 in black and white, and 12 line drawings. They include not only pictures from contemporary sources—such as the picture scrolls and woodblock prints— but also photographs of kimono masterpieces and representative textiles.

Provides a general overview of literature relating to Japan and covers a broad range of subject matter, from art, feminism, and linguistics, to corporate culture, history, and medicine. Includes books published since 1980 that are related to the geographical area of Japan and to Japanese culture within that area.

The clothes we wear tell stories about us—and are often imbued with cultural meanings specific to our ethnic heritage. This concise A-to-Z encyclopedia explores 150 different and distinct items of ethnic dress, their history, and their cultural significance within the United States. The clothing artifacts documented here have been or are now regularly worn by Americans as everyday clothing, fashion, ethnic or religious identifiers, or style statements. They embody the cultural history of the United States and its peoples, from Native Americans, white Anglo colonists, and forcibly relocated black slaves to the influx of immigrants from around the world. Entries consider how dress items may serve as symbolic linkages to home country and family or worn as visible forms of opposition to dominant cultural norms. Taken together, they offer insight into the ethnic-based core ideologies, myths, and cultural codes that have played a role in the formation and continued story of the United States.

Modern Fashion Traditions questions the dynamics of fashion systems and spaces of consumption outside the West. Too often, these fashion systems are studied as a mere and recent result of globalization and Western fashion influences, but this book draws on a wide range of non-Western case studies and analyses their similarities and differences as legitimate fashion systems, contesting Eurocentric notions of tradition and modernity, continuity versus change, and 'the West versus the Rest'. Preconceptions about non-Western fashion are challenged through diverse case studies from international scholars, including street-style identity in Bhutan, the influence of Ottoman cultural heritage on contemporary Turkish fashion design, and an investigation into the origins of the word 'fashion' in Chinese. Negotiating tradition, foreign influences and the contemporary global dominance of Western fashion cities, Modern Fashion Traditions will give readers a clearer understanding of non-Western fashion identities in the present. Accessibly written, this ground-breaking text makes an essential contribution to the study of non-Western fashion and will be an important resource for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Japanese Fashion examines the entire sweep of Japanese clothing history, from the sophisticated fashion systems of late-Edo period kimonos to the present day, providing possible theories of how Japan made this fashion journey and linking current theories of fashion to the Japanese example. The book is unique in that it provides the first full history of the last 200 years of Japanese clothing. It is also the first book to include Asian fashion as part of global fashion as well as fashion theory. It adds a hitherto absent continuity to the understanding of historical and current fashion in Japan, and is pioneering in offering possible theories to account for that entire history. By providing an analysis of how that entire history changes our understanding of the way fashion works, this book will be an essential text for all students of fashion and design.

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer. Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foundations of the modern kimono fashion industry. It explores the crossover between ‘art’ and ‘fashion’ in this period at the hands of famous Japanese painters who worked with clothing pattern books and painted directly onto garments. With Japan’s exposure to Western fashion in the nineteenth century, and Westerners’ exposure to Japanese modes of dress and design, the kimono took on new associations and came to symbolize an exotic culture and an alluring female form. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the kimono industry was sustained through government support. The line between fashion and art became blurred as kimonos produced by famous designers were collected for their beauty and displayed in museums, rather than being worn as clothing. Today, the kimono has once again taken on new dimensions, as the Internet and social media proliferate images of the kimono as a versatile garment to be integrated into a range of individual styles. Kimono: A Modern History, the inspiration for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,not only tells the story of a distinctive garment’s ever-changing functions and image, but provides a novel perspective on Japan’s modernization and encounter with the West.

Introduction -- Dictionary -- Appendix A: Garment types -- Appendix B: Garment by country -- Appendix C: Garment types by era