Word: kimono
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Tokyo's big Mitsukoshi department store was acting out part of its heritage last week. Founded three centuries ago as a kimono shop, Mitsukoshi was aswirl in its annual kimono sale-unquestionably the largest, silkiest, costliest and most colorful event of its kind anywhere. Thousands of kimonos were spread over an acre of selling space at prices averaging $350* and ranging up to $10,700. With a small army of 300 kimono-clad saleswomen amid the racks, Mitsukoshi officials expect to sell $2.1 million worth of the traditional Japanese garments before the sale ends Sept...
...first character of this verse by the 11th century Lady Sagami, "Tagasode: whose Sleeves . . .," has been adopted as the title of the spring exhibition that opens this week at New York's Japan House Gallery. It consists of 43 elaborate Edo-period kimono, chosen from 11,000 examples from Japan's foremost private collection. Almost all the techniques of kimono making - especially the two major ones, tie-dyeing and resist-dyeing - are on view in examples of the highest quality (see color...
...craft was in traditional Japanese culture: a kosode, or small-sleeved robe - like the 17th century garment in two colors of figured satin, the jagged yellow sheet sweeping diagonally upward across its black ground - is as satisfying a work of art as any scroll or painted screen. Some kimono are filmy and almost blank, with patterns and emblems grouped in small areas. Others, like the takarazukushi, or "myriad treasures" robes, swarming with thousands of embroidered good-luck symbols, look thick enough to stand up on their...
Whatever the material or the subject, the sense of design never falters. Nor the painstaking labor required of kimono makers. The most difficult technique was known as sō-hitta, or overall tie-dyeing. The word suggests rich hippies in blotchy homemade tank tops, but the Japanese craftsmen of the Edo period raised this system of knotting and immersion-dyeing to a most taxing pitch of subtlety. The furisode ("swinging sleeves" kimono), with its design of a lone pine tree running up the back, required hundreds of thousands of knots, each placed with fanatical precision so that the untied...
Perpetual Discontent. Only one craftsman could work on the kimono since, as Textile Historian Nishimura Hyōbu remarks in the catalogue notes, "a change of workers - or even a brief illness - could result in an irreparable alteration of the rhythm of the tying and the evenness of the results." The knots took more than a year to tie and another year to undo, one by one. Because the process cost so much, the making of sō-hitta was outlawed by the Japanese sumptuary laws of 1683, which attempted to control extravagance in clothing. But the tie-dyed kimono...