Fashioning Kimono:
Art Deco and Modernism in Japan

November 15, 2008 - February 8, 2009 

This exhibition includes 100 kimono created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – one of the most dynamic periods in the history of Japan’s national costume.  It includes formal, semi-formal, and casual kimono, haori jackets, and undergarments worn by men, women, and children.  While many of these garments reflect historical continuity in designs and techniques, many more illustrate a dramatic break from kimono tradition.  The exhibition begins with the final era of the “living” kimono, that is, when kimono remained the dress of choice, worn daily by the majority of people in Japan, and continues through the 1940s and 1950s, when Western clothes came to replace the kimono for everyday wear, and the kimono assumed a purely formal meaning.  These kimono, drawn from the Montgomery Collection in Lugano, Switzerland, along with a selection of period photographs on loan from the International Hokusai Research Centre in Milan, reflect the modernization of Japan in the early twentieth century.

Images:

IMAGES COURTESY OF AND USED UNDER LICENSE FROM

MONTGOMERY COLLECTION, LUGANO

COLLECTION JCII PHOTO SALON, TOKYO

INTERNATIONAL HOKUSAI RESEARCH CENTRE