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.

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.

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.

This edited volume on radical dress reforms in East Asia takes a fresh look at the symbols and languages of modernity in dress and body. Dress reform movements around the turn of the twentieth century in the region have received little critical attention as a multicultural discourse of labor, body, gender identity, colonialism, and government authority. With contributions by leading experts of costume/textile history of China, Korea, and Japan, this book presents up-to-date scholarship using diverse methodologies in costume history, history of consumption, and international trade. Thematically organized into sections exploring the garments and uniforms, accessories, fabrics, and fashion styles of Asia, this edited volume offers case studies for students and scholars in an ever-expanding field of material culture including, but not limited to, economic history, visual culture, art history, history of journalism, and popular culture. Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia stimulates further research on the impact of modernity and imperialism in neglected areas such as military uniform, school uniform, women’s accessories, hairstyles, and textile trade.

The most significant of the more than 175 varieties of Japanese ornamental trees featured, along with a discussion of Japanese garden design, and cultivation tips for home gardeners.

This two-volume set presents information and images of the varied clothing and textiles of cultures around the world, allowing readers to better appreciate the richness and diversity of human culture and history. The contributors to Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World examine clothing that is symbolic of the people who live in regions all over the world, providing a historical and geographic perspective that illustrates how people dress and explains the reasons behind the material, design, and style. The encyclopedia features a preface and introduction to its contents. Each entry in the encyclopedia includes a short historical and geographical background for the topic before discussing the clothing of people in that country or region of the world. This work will be of great interest to high school students researching fashion, fashion history, or history as well as to undergraduate students and general readers interested in anthropology, textiles, fashion, ethnology, history, or ethnic dress.

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.