Crafting kimonos

Kimono, the colourful traditional Japanese apparel, is a precision art in itself. Liza foreman writes about the time-consuming and intricate process of hand-crafting this attractive robe

When you consider the amount of time that one of Japan’s most famous kimono makers spends on each garment, even the most celebrated Western couture houses start to look like fast fashion.

Chiso, founded in Kyoto in 1555, creates standard kimonos in three to four months, but it is not unusual for special orders to take 18 months or more. The company even spent 10 years helping to develop a dyeing technique for one special indigo kimono.
“Chiso expresses the essence of Japanese beauty,” said Hiragane Yuichi, director of the Arts and Crafts Association in Osaka, who used to train Chiso’s designers. “It is a company, but it isn’t just a business. It creates a culture of Japanese beauty.”

Managers say there are 20 to 25 steps to producing a kimono, from design to sales. “Our producing process starts from planning, and then designing, checking right after each process is done,” said Emi Kanasaki, manager of Sohya, Chiso’s modern kimono brand, which was founded in 2005.

About 70 of Chiso’s 100 employees work at its headquarters on Sanjo Street in central Kyoto. (The rest work in the Tokyo office.) The building has a popular tea house on the ground floor and a small gallery for kimono displays.

Thoughts behind patterns

One morning, designers in a spare office space upstairs were copying an old kimono pattern onto a large piece of paper. A young man sat at a desktop computer nearby with a pretty kimono pattern displayed on its large monitor. Chiso has been using computers in the design process for five years, and now sends digital versions to clients to show potential mixes of pattern, colour and material. The team also draws on its own library, with books and filing cabinets filled with kimono designs dating back hundreds of years.

En Isomoto, Chiso’s production manager and president of one of its two subsidiaries, pulled out books on water and the Edo Period (1600-1868), as well as a design inspired by Venice’s Grand Canal, to show a visitor. “Each object represents something different” in kimono design, he explained. “Water represents eternity and power. A pine tree represents strength. It is a good omen.”

Clients’ choices, even today, reflect the traditional Japanese respect for nature. “Cherry blossom can only be worn in January, February or March,” Ms Kanasaki said. “There are two aims in the design for the wearer: to show their enjoyment in the season, and to show their education.”

Kimono trends are also influenced by Western fashion, Isomoto said, like the most popular colours of a particular fashion season.

Akiko Fukai, chief curator and director of the celebrated Kyoto Costume Institute, said such inspiration works both ways. “There have been many Western designers influenced by the kimono,” she said, noting that both Prada and Gucci had references in their spring/summer 2013 collections. Over the years, so have designers like Madeleine Vionnet, Jacques Doucet, Mariano Fortuny, John Galliano and Dries Van Noten.

Chiso itself has an innovative attitude, Fukai continued, “including its collaboration with many fashion designers, in particular Yohji Yamamoto. Most kimono makers in Kyoto are too conservative to look at the new field.” In 2005, the company created a special line of flip-flops for Havaianas, and it has designed labels for the Japanese beverage giant Suntory for five years.

Although the yukata, or simple summer kimono, has come back into fashion with some young Japanese, kimonos now are mainly reserved for such special occasions as weddings and graduations. Chiso annually sells around 5,000 through major department stores and custom makes about 100.

Honda Tadashi is one of Chiso’s approximately 600 collaborators, artists and artisans who work on a freelance basis, often from their homes in or around Kyoto. Trained by his father, who was a Chiso employee, Honda works mostly on Furisode kimonos, a style worn exclusively by young women.

When the artist receives pieces of kimono silk from Chiso, the design already has been outlined in an extract made of spiderwort, a three-petalled perennial flower. He spends about a month painting in the pattern, following the design team’s directions and using 40 to 50 colours.

“Over the years, the colours have changed,” Honda said, painting pretty reds and greens onto white silk. “They used to be darker. This year, pinks and greens are in vogue.”

Dyeing is done at Takahashi Toku, a workshop that is only a short bike ride from the Chiso headquarters. Although the two companies are separate businesses, they have been collaborators for more than 100 years.

Takahashi Toku specialises in yuzen, a dyeing process developed in the mid-17th century that initially uses a rubber-based paste to protect areas from dye and then a complex series of applications and steaming treatments. It also has skilled workers who can add embellishment like embroidery or metallic leaf to finish a design.

Shuki Takahashi, the son of the workshop’s president, quickly brushed a mauve dye across a long piece of white silk that had been stretched across a bamboo frame. “Not so many people know how to do this today,” he said, explaining that the colour will dry evenly only if the room’s temperature is constant and it is closed to natural light to avoid shadows.

Later, over tea, Takahashi displayed the records of his 10 years of work to create the indigo kimono, which sold for 20 million yen, last year. In addition to using a time-consuming dyeing process from the Edo Period, he said, the kimono “was dyed not only with indigo but also other vegetable dyes. For the vegetable dyes, they had to experiment with many kinds of silk to find which fabric suits to each dye. These experiments to achieve the colour took a long time.”

Takahashi now devotes much of his time to developing new techniques. “I want to keep working on dyeing so that Kyoto is known for dyeing in the future,” as it has been in the past, he said.

Just as the city is considered the centre of Japan’s cultural heritage, it also continues to be the centre of kimono making — in part because of its pristine water, said Isomoto, Chiso’s production manager.

The water has not changed over the centuries, he said, ensuring the best results for dyeing and fabric treatments. The Takahashi workshop, in particular, “is situated to receive water that flows through the area of Kamigamo to the Imperial Palace and is of a special quality,” he said.