Kimono is a generic term for traditional Japanese clothing; it means thing to wear. This book provides an overview of some traditional garments, introduces types of designs found in twentieth century kimono that are still available, and presents wearable art inspired by kimono from contemporary artists. Over 525 color photographs display brilliant and subtle textile designs and demonstrate beauty in mens, womens, and childrens garments and accessories.

Kimono is a generic term for traditional Japanese clothing; it means thing to wear. This book provides an overview of some traditional garments, introduces types of designs found in twentieth century kimono that are still available, and presents wearable art inspired by kimono from contemporary artists. Over 525 color photographs display brilliant and subtle textile designs and demonstrate beauty in mens, womens, and childrens garments and accessories.

It is widely assumed that kimono is the antithesis to fashion because it is a traditional dress format. Literature in English presents kimono as a tradition or art and rarely addresses the idea of style change in the 20th century. Histories of kimono trace the development of kimono until the 20th century and then focus on the adoption of cosmopolitan clothing in Japan and kimono is relegated to the frozen realm of tradition and symbolism. The scarcity of literature on 20th century kimono development has led to the notion that kimono is a static form of dress. The stereotype of an immutable traditional dress contrasts with the kind of recycled kimono available and does not present a clear picture of developments in 20th century kimono.Studies specifically on kimono have focused on art, history or on kimono's social role. Studies on art, history and the social role in cosmopolitan clothing reveal the changing fashions. However, in similar studies on kimono, the main conclusion is that kimono is vanishing and only survives now in a fixed format for formal occasions. In response to the fact that kimono maintains currency scholars have framed it as a reinvented tradition. Rather than acknowledging the changes that have occurred over the 20th century as ongoing developments, there is a dialogue of loss and attempts to preserve tradition. This study describes a way to see 20th century kimono in a different light using the concept of skilled visions. I propose that there have been fashions in women's kimono right through the 20th century and aim to explicate these changing styles by explaining a way of perceiving change.

This classic text of Japanese culture contains a wealth of information about traditional Japan and Japanese customs. Pawnshops and handmade paper, shoe shiners and Shinto jugglers, money rakes and mosquito netting--all these were once a familiar part of daily life in Japan. Many elements of that daily life, like the Obon dances and oreiboko apprenticeships, have no counterpart in any other culture: they are purely unique to Japan. But with the tremendous changes of the modern age, most traces of traditional life in Japan are fast disappearing, soon to be gone forever. Still, there are a few holdouts, especially in Japan's shitamachi, or working-class neighborhoods, where many of the survivors of Japanese crafts, art forms, and festivals are making their last stand. Vanishing Japan is a must-read for tourists, historians, architects, or artists who are interested in Japanese culture.

To educate people on the basics of kimono.

Japan’s engagement with Western clothing, culture, and art in the mid-nineteenth century transformed the traditional kimono and began a cross-cultural sartorial dialogue that continues to this day. This publication explores the kimono’s fascinating modern history and its notable influence on Western fashion. Initially signaling the wearer’s social position, marital status, age, and wealth, older kimono designs gave way to the demands of modernized and democratized twentieth-century lifestyles as well as the preferences of the emancipated “new woman.” Conversely, inspiration from the kimono’s silhouette liberated Western designers such as Paul Poiret and Madeline Vionnet from traditional European tailoring. Juxtaposing never-before-published Japanese textiles from the John C. Weber Collection with Western couture, this book places the kimono on the stage of global fashion history.

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.

The makers of obi, the elegant and costly sash worn over kimono in Japan, belong to an endangered species. These families of manufacturers, weavers, and other craftspeople centered in the Nishijin weaving district of Kyoto have practiced their demanding craft for generations. In recent decades, however, as a result of declining markets for kimono, they find their livelihood and pride harder to sustain. This book is a poignant exploration of a vanishing world. Tamara Hareven integrates historical research with intensive life history interviews to reveal the relationships among family, work, and community in this highly specialized occupation. Hareven uses her knowledge of textile workers' lives in the United States and Western Europe to show how striking similarities in weavers' experiences transcend cultural differences. These very rich personal testimonies, taken over a decade and a half, provide insight into how these men and women have juggled family and work roles and coped with insecurities. Readers can learn firsthand how weavers perceive their craft and how they interpret their lives and view the world around them. With rare immediacy, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto captures a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

From rugged Japanese firemen's ceremonial robes and austere rural work-wear to colorful, delicately-patterned cotton kimonos, this lavishly illustrated volume explores Japan's rich tradition of textiles. Textiles are an eloquent form of cultural expression and of great importance in the daily life of a people, as well as in their rituals and ceremonies. The traditional clothing and fabrics featured in this book were made and used in the islands of the Japanese archipelago between the late 18th and the mid 20th century. The Thomas Murray collection featured in this book includes daily dress, work-wear, and festival garb and follows the Arts and Crafts philosophy of the Mingei Movement, which saw that modernization would leave behind traditional art forms such as the hand-made textiles used by country people, farmers, and fisherman. It presents subtly patterned cotton fabrics, often indigo dyed from the main islands of Honshu and Kyushu, along with garments of the more remote islands: the graphic bark cloth, nettle fiber, and fish skin robes of the aboriginal Ainu in Hokkaido and Sakhalin to the north, and the brilliantly colored cotton kimonos of Okinawa to the far south. Numerous examples of these fabrics, photographed in exquisite detail, offer insight into Japan's complex textile history as well as inspiration for today's designers and artists. This volume explores the range and artistry of the country's tradition of fiber arts and is an essential resource for anyone captivated by the Japanese aesthetic.

Western fashion has been widely appreciated and consumed in Tokyo for decades, but since the mid-1990s Japanese youth have been playing a crucial role in forming their own unique fashion communities and producing creative styles which have had a major impact on fashion globally. Geographically and stylistically defined, subcultures such as Lolita in Harajuku, Gyaru and Gyaru-o in Shibuya, Age-jo in Shinjuku, and Mori Girl in Kouenji, reflect the affiliation and identities of their members, and have often blurred the boundary between professionals and amateurs for models, photographers, merchandisers and designers. Based on insightful ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures is the first theoretical and analytical study on Japan's contemporary youth subcultures and their stylistic expressions. It is essential reading for students, scholars and anyone interested in fashion, sociology and subcultures.