It's hard not to associate tie-dye with an image of long-haired grass-smoking, free-lovin', barefoot hippies dancing around in colorful dyed shirts and long skirts to the clang of a "far out" tambourine beat.
Even though hippie chic wasn't my thing, I still made a few tie-dye shirts in high school for fun, indiscriminately bunching rubber bands wherever I felt like it, and swirling my father's undershirts around in buckets of bright color.
After coming to Japan, my impressions changed. This once trippy pattern, when seen in the brilliant hues of hand-dyed indigo, appeared to me as the very essence of simplicity and elegance. Ethereal shades of indigo, such as ai (Japan blue) and hanada (Orient blue), which have been used in Japanese tie-dye textiles for hundreds of years, are now embedded in my mind as the color of Japan. My image of Woodstockers morphed into visions of people in cool summer yukata, dancing under lanterns at a summer festival -- an event with a noticeable lack of patchouli-scented folk.