Kimono
Subtitle: a modern history
By: Terry Satsuki Milhaupt
Publisher: Reaktion books
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9781780232782
Subjects: Social life and customs; Fashion and art; Social aspects; Kimonos; Clothing and dress; Costume; Social conditions; Women; History
Description: 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.
Notes: Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2014.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-286) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The foundations of a kimono fashion industry; title: Modernizing the kimono; title: Shopping for kimonos, shaping identities; title: The kimono ideal migrates West; title: Kimono designers; title: Everyday and extraordinary, then and now.