After a fashion: One kimono, two kimono, 80 lovely kimono

In the first half of the 20th century, the genius of Japanese textile design electrified its audience

Patricia McLaughlin  —  5/22/2008 5:14 am

The exhibition of kimono that opened last week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art beguiles the eye with one example after another of pure gorgeousness. The show includes 80 kimono (the word can be either singular or plural: who knew?) made in the first half of the 20th century. It traces the modernizing of Japanese textile design, and the ways it influenced and was influenced in its turn by European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

The show focuses on what would turn out to be the last few decades of the kimono's 1,100-year reign as the garment worn every day by most Japanese men, women and children.

It's almost as if the centuries-old textile design tradition that developed in tandem with the kimono can feel its future disappearing: In its last years it accelerates its evolution and dazzles its public with an explosion of innovation.

The changes are "very dramatic," curator Kristina Haugland says, adding that the colors and patterns grow "amazingly bolder, brighter, more punchy."

Soft shades produced by vegetable dyes give way to intense, fully saturated colors achieved with chemicals -- like the Valentine red of an intricately tie-dyed underkimono. Traditional motifs are updated; small patterns explode; tiny figures inflate.

An abstract six-pointed flower or star figure built up of six tiny interlocking diamonds, traditionally used row upon row to create a subtle overall geometric pattern, escapes from its grid and blooms, expanding to reach from one selvage of its fabric to the other. It's almost like watching a busy, intricate Liberty floral morph into a vivid two-foot-wide Marimekko poppy -- or like seeing the Three Little Maids from School break into a boogie.

Haugland explains that less costly silk produced by new technologies, and more efficient printing, stenciling and weaving techniques introduced at the end of the 19th century set the scene for the design revolution. They brought casual, affordable silk kimono within reach of a wider market and probably helped to accelerate the changes in fabric design. She says the edgy new designs satisfied the wish of fashionable women to be at once "very modern and very Japanese."

Department stores debuted new kimono collections each spring and fall and, the exhibition notes say, young Japanese women flocked to buy them. As the fashion cycle picked up speed, last year's dated designs would be put away in favor of something more up-to-the-minute.

This glorious flowering of the boldly printed everyday kimono was brief: By the 1950s, with most Japanese men and women adopting Western dress for everyday wear, kimono were reserved for formal occasions such as weddings and festivals, which required elaborate formal kimono.

The jazzy everyday kimono of the 1930s and 1940s, with their lively colors and dramatic patterns, disappeared into trunks along with the outdated designs they'd replaced. Now you can buy them by the bale.

Just as poignant, even haunting, is the way the show interweaves threads of new and deja vu, strange and familiar, exotic and instantly recognizable.

Some of the exploded florals are eerily reminiscent of the flowered barkcloth slipcovers Americans were using around the same time to cover faded upholstery, and that are now much in demand by crafters of artisanal handbags, tote bags and funky toss pillows. One dramatic pattern might've been inspired by the monster tropical ferns on my grandmother's guest room wallpaper.

Kimono and coordinated haori jackets made for little boys are printed with planes, trains and automobiles -- and baseballs, too. They reminded me of my little brothers' print flannel footie pajamas with big-league pinstripes or cowboys riding the range. A kimono made for an older boy shows tanks, battleships and bombers that the exhibition notes identify as Mitsubishi Ki-21s.

Sheer summer kimono are printed with delectable cool things -- ocean waves, snow-frosted landscapes -- not unlike the "Air Conditioned" signs inevitably depicting snowcapped mountains that American restaurants and movie theaters displayed back when air conditioning was a rare luxury.

The show includes contemporary photographs to give a sense of how these kimonos were worn in their day. Many of these look startlingly like my mother's and grandmothers' and aunts' graduation pictures from the same era.

In several photos, young women dressed in kimono sport coiffures more indebted to Claudette Colbert than to Madame Butterfly. A group shot of actresses shows some in kimono, some in Western dress, but all with the same deep-red lipstick and 1940s updos and pageboys favored by the Andrews Sisters.

So many details are as familiar as Mom's apple pie -- until you get to the body the kimono is meant to enfold, which couldn't be more foreign.

Corsets, bustles, merry widows, girdles, waist cinchers, hip slips, Spanx, Wonderbras, aerobics, Jazzercise, spinning, weights, liposuction, abdominoplasty, breast implants, any number of weirdo diets and patent remedies -- that only begins the list of things American women have bought, worn, done and had done to themselves to achieve body shapes that go in and out by just the right amount in all the right places.

That painful history makes the Japanese body ideal almost unthinkable: How can it be that, for centuries, kimono-clad Japanese women aspired to a purely cylindrical silhouette with no ins and outs at all? If they had the misfortune to have tiny Scarlett O'Hara-type waists, they wrapped towels around their middles to make them bigger, so as to look exquisitely straight-up-and-down in their kimono. (Which sounds a lot less painful than a corset.)

The existence of so opposite an aesthetic can't not make you think that at least some of our ideas about what's pretty are pretty weird, pretty arbitrary and pointlessly demoralizing.

Unfathomable as the cylindrical ideal may be, it's only a little less startling -- and it hardly seems fair -- to see women wear such elaborate formal dress with white cotton socks and flat sandals instead of punishing spike heels. Their geta, or thong sandals, are not so different from the flip-flops members of Northwestern's champion women's lacrosse team wore to the White House a few years ago, thereby scandalizing the nation.

Patricia McLaughlin writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer. patsy.mcl@verizon.net.

Patricia McLaughlin  —  5/22/2008 5:14 am