In 2016, models adorned in silk kimonos paraded down a concrete, industrial runway at New York Fashion Week in midtown Manhattan. Some of the garments were solid and clean, often in bold colors, while others were covered in elaborate floral or animal embroidery. The collection was the result of designer Hiromi Asai’s years of work dedicated to preserving Japanese kimono craftsmanship and introducing the garments as high fashion beyond the bounds of national dress.
“Not many people see kimonos as fashion,” she says in an interview over video chat. Outside of Japan, many people view the outfits as “some kind of culture, or a type of costume.” But to Asai, the kimono is fashion — a piece of clothing transcending cultural barriers, fit for the spotlight at any major international fashion event.
In recent decades, the kimono has had a new lease on life. Japanese and overseas fashion designers have drawn influence from the textiles and fits of the garment, adapting and transforming kimonos with contemporary approaches: In 2008, Japanese designer Jotaro Saito showed denim kimonos at Tokyo Fashion Week; in 2016, Nikkei Asia charted the emergence of “more accessible, affordable kimonos that women can wear like shirts, skirts and other Western clothing”; and fashion house Maison Margiela took cues from kimonos for its 2018 men’s collection by incorporating antique obi into its looks.
And yet, as Andrew McKirdy wrote in The Japan Times in 2020, in Japan, “the garment has all but vanished from everyday life.” Asai says the market for traditional kimono is small here and abroad.
And so, Asai’s mission to protect the kimono’s legacy of craftsmanship has never been more critical. It has also never been more important to understand the contours of the garment’s historical significance as a nexus between Japan and the West’s fashion cultures.
“Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection,” an ongoing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City traces the historical roots of a cross-cultural conversation in fashion. The exhibition, which begins with kimono-like costumes used for noh and kyogen theater during the middle of the Edo Period (1603-1868) and ends with pieces from the 1920s and ’30s, shows how designers and artisans in Japan and the West have influenced and shaped each other’s works — with “the kimono as the catalyst,” says Monika Bincsik, who curated the show with Karen Van Godtsenhoven.
In displaying kimonos alongside Western garments, woodblock prints and other objects primarily drawn from the private collection of John C. Weber, who has amassed over 200 items since the 1990s, the curators also ask a larger question: What is fashion?
“A lot of people associate the idea of fashion with major brands and the current fashion industry and usually assume that the origins of the concept can be traced back to France or Italy,” says Bincsik. “But actually, we can discover a very sophisticated fashion system in Japan as well, as early as the mid-17th century.”
Bincsik says women of the Edo Period often looked at woodblock prints — early fashion magazines, in many ways — “to learn about the most fashionable patterns, colors (and) dying techniques” and to understand what was in style at the time. During this era, the Tokugawa shogunate restricted some facets of dress — from the use of certain techniques to materials — and an elaborate and detailed kimono often reflected the standing of the wearer in society. (As the exhibition highlights, men also wore kimono, at times for utilitarian purposes, including fighting fires or battle.)
Toward the middle of the exhibition, it becomes clear how the kimono has been a rich and adaptable template for innovation in textiles and form for Western fashion since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While Japan was undergoing a period of modernization and Westernization during the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the country’s culture was also spreading abroad to the West, and kimonos influenced a shift in European fashion from corsets to loose-fitting clothes. In 1919, Paul Poiret crafted an opera coat from one 15-foot bolt of fabric with a single seam and little adornment — drawing from the kimono in its form and simplicity, but also its hallmark: the concept of creating an outfit from a single piece of fabric. The Met exhibition also includes gowns and coats inspired by the kimono’s silhouette and designed in Japan for foreign women.
In Japan in the 1920s and ’30s, kimonos were consumed en masse. They were made more accessible through meisen kimonos, affordable garments made using pre-dyed threads. Department stores, influenced by Harrods in London and John Wanamaker Department Store in Philadelphia, displayed these kimonos alongside Western garbs.
One of the exhibition’s most striking examples of European influence on Japanese fashion is demonstrated by a meisen kimono from the 1930s. The piece’s red, yellow and blue blocks draw inspiration from Piet Mondrian paintings, which were all the rage in Europe at the time. Displayed alongside the kimono is a dress designed by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli with a similar color palette and loose silhouette.
At the end of the exhibition, a single bolt of dark blue fabric hangs from the ceiling and gently unfurls onto the wooden floor. It has small slits and faint outlines of a V-neck sweater, a pair of gloves, a handbag and socks cut into the double-layered cloth.
It is an APOC, or “A Piece of Cloth,” designed by Issey Miyake in the 1990s and meant to reimage the manufacturing and consumption of fashion. As Godtsenhoven writes in the exhibition catalog, the garment reflects the global influence of Japanese designers from the 1980s onward as well as an attempt by figures such as Miyake and Rei Kawakubo “to re-interpret their identity in a cycle of re-Orientalization and renewal (fashion curator Akiko) Fukai called ‘neo-Japanism.’”
As Godtsenhoven continues, “The movement started in the 1970s, when the Japanese designers took Paris by storm. By the 1980s it had fundamentally changed Western fashion.”
Despite the inclusion of kimono influences in modern high fashion, there is still work to be done to make sure the traditions of kimono craftsmanship endure and even flourish. In recent years, Asai has ventured into menswear, drawing from newly produced kimono textiles to craft clothes fit for a global consumer. For the designer, the essence of the kimono is in the fabrics rather than the form. In Miami Beach this July, for example, she showcased a collection that included a robe-like garment worn over a speedo with an obijime (braided cord) loosely wrapped around the model’s torso.
By creating designs that reshape how a global audience sees the storied garment, Asai hopes to impact the world of fashion and pass on the artistry of kimono textiles to future generations.
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