will we ever really know kimono at all?

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED WORMS

(from a Japanese legend)

Disdaining butterflies
as frivolous,
she puttered with caterpillars,
and wore a coarse kimono,
crinkled and loose at the neck.

Refused to tweeze her brows
to crescents,
and scowled beneath dark bands
of caterpillar fur.

Even the stationery
on which she scrawled
unkempt calligraphy,
startled the jade-inlaid
indolent ladies,
whom she despised
like the butterflies
wafting kimono sleeves
through senseless poems
about moonsets and peonies;
popular rot of the times.

No, she loved worms,
blackening the moon of her nails
with mud and slugs,
root gnawing grubs,
and the wing case of beetles.

And crouched in the garden,
tugging at her unpinned hair,
weevils queuing across her bare
and unbound feet.

Swift as wasps, the years.
Midge, tick and maggot words
crowded her haikus
and lines on her skin turned her old,
thin as a spinster cricket.

Noon in the snow pavilion,
gulping heated sake
she recalled Lord Unamuro,
preposterous toad
squatting by the teatray,
proposing with conditions
a suitable marriage.

Ha! She stoned imaginary butterflies,
and pinching dirt,
crawled to death’s cocoon
dragging a moth to inspect
in the long afternoon.

Colette Inez


“The Woman Who Loved Worms” from Getting Under Way:
New and Selected Poems by Colette Inez.
(Story Line Press, 1993)

dedicated to janejohn

travelling along the contours

THE SHAPES OF LEAVES

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak,
sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the ex- panse and contours of grief
along the edges of
a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at
the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching
gravel roads,

and felt a moment of
pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

Arthur Sze

From The Redshifting Web:
Poems 1970-1998,
published by Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze.


i discovered a cool blog today; its author and i sometimes think alike.

a private space disclosed

BEAUTY AND SADNESS

He drew hundreds of women
in studies unfolding

like flowers from a fan.

Teahouse waitresses, actresses,
geishas, courtesans and maids.

They arranged themselves
before this quick, nimble man
whose invisible presence
one feels in these prints
is as delicate
as the skinlike paper
he used to transfer
and retain their fleeting loveliness.

Crouching like cats,
they purred amid the layers of kimono
swirling around them
as though they were bathing
in a mountain pool with irises
growing in the silken sunlit water.

Or poised like porcelain vases,
slender, erect and tall; their heavy
brocaded hair was piled high
with sandalwood combs and blossom sprigs
poking out like antennae.
They resembled beautiful iridescent insects,
creatures from a floating world.

Utamaro absorbed these women of Edo
in their moments of melancholy
as well as of beauty.

He captured the wisp of shadows,
the half- draped body
emerging from a bath; whatever
skin was exposed
was powdered white as snow.

A private space disclosed.
Portraying another girl
catching a glimpse of her own vulnerable
face in the mirror, he transposed
the trembling plum lips
like a drop of blood
soaking up the white expanse of paper.

At times, indifferent to his inconsolable
eye, the women drifted
through the soft gray feathered light,
maintaining stillness, the moments in between.

Like the dusty ash-winged moths
that cling to the screens in summer
and that the Japanese venerate
as ancestors reincarnated;
Utamaro graced these women with immortality
in the thousand sheaves of prints
fluttering into the reverent hands of keepers:
the dwarfed and bespectacled painter
holding up to a square of sunlight
what he had carried home beneath his coat
one afternoon in winter.

Cathy Song
from Picture Bride by Cathy Song.
Copyright © 1983 by Yale University Press.

if you have ever wished to make a round-the-world tour in the pursuit of museum exhibitions about kimono, this is the summer of your dreams:

Ohio, Melbourne, Ontario, Philadelphia, Maine, Oregon, Tokyo, & Wisconsin! (okay, okay. i know some of them have just passed and some are in the fall but give me a break.)

and to respond to cathy song's poem, i too question who was happy, who was sad. as does this movie:

for the true tales of a wearer of kimono, see this blog.

de geisha designs

While nineteenth- century critics had reservations about artists' adopting Japanese conventions in paintings and prints, this was not true in the arena of fashion. French textile designers in the 1890s, for example, readily appropriated new and "exotic" floral motifs from Japan, and these fabrics were readily used by couturiers like Charles Frederick Worth.

The most popular item of dress exported to the West in the late nineteenth century was a modified version of the kimono, worn as a dressing gown. Both fully finished garments and unsewn components were sold at small boutiques and at large firms such as Liberty of London. Kimonos for export were often constructed with elements to suit the European market; these might include a set-in box pleat to accommodate the bustle; a collar lining instead of an under kimono; the addition of a knotted and tasseled trim; and a variety of sleeve styles.

In the decade prior to World War I, the construction of women's garments began to change dramatically. As early as 1908, revolutionary couturiers, such as Marie Callot Gerber and Paul Poiret, took inspiration from the drapery-like quality of kimonos. Loosely cut sleeves and crossed bodices were incorporated into evening dresses, while opera coats swathed the body like batwinged cocoons.

One of the twentieth century's greatest couturiers, Madeleine Vionnet, was inspired by the kimono with its reliance on uncut lengths of fabric, and raised dressmaking to an art form. From the onset of World War I to the late 1920s, she abandoned the traditional practice of tailoring body-fitted fashions from numerous, complex pattern pieces, and minimized the cutting of fabric.

A "minimalist" with strict aesthetic principles who rarely employed patterned fabrics or embroidery, Vionnet relied instead on surface ornamentation through manipulation of the fabric itself. For example, the wavy parallel folds of a pin-tucked crepe dress evoked the abstracted image of a raked Zen rock garden, itself a metaphor for the waves of the sea.

Although the influence of the kimono on the construction of garments was extremely important in the 1910s and 1920s, surface ornamentation remained a vital force. During the art moderne, or art deco, era, French textiles in the Japanese style developed a more sophisticated use of both abstract motifs and recognizable images.

Examples range from metallic lamé dresses that replicate the appearance of black lacquer inlaid with gold particles, to garments of brocaded silk woven with a pattern of crashing waves and fish scales. Also appropriated was the mon, or family crest. While the mon is usually an abstracted image drawn from nature, such as a bird or flower, it can also represent a man-made object, such as the nara bi-ya, or parallel rows of arrows; or celestial bodies such as the mitsuboshi, an abstraction symbolizing the three stars of Orion's belt.

from Japonisme, by Patricia Mears. Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Ed. Valerie Steele

(what interests me is seeing the interpretations of the japanese designs by the western artists. i generally like them better than the original japanese or the western style either.)

When the West Reflects the East

PARIS: The dress is spring green, its flat surface ruffled like wind on water. A pebble path and a few drifting leaves add to the zen-like tranquility of the Japanese garden.

This is not cherry blossom time in Kyoto, but a French couture outfit in a Paris museum. The pallid background, the pebbles and the spare setting, are meant to enhance an original take on East meets West, as rising sun embroideries or bare-nape evening coats are displayed beside the traditional kimonos and geisha prints that inspired them.

The result is an exceptional and thought-provoking exhibition called "Japonisme et Mode 1870-1996" (Fashion and Japanese Style) at the Palais Galliéra costume museum until Aug. 4 [1996]. Although the show originated in Kyoto in 1994, the Paris version has a subtly different slant. It needs to explain the essence of the kimono to Europeans and also to show how high fashion from the mid-19th century on has absorbed the pure spirit of the East, just as Claude Monet was drawn to an aesthetic that "evoked a presence by its shadow, the whole by a fragment."

Themes from Japanese culture are isolated and given their fashion reflections: lacquer work as the shimmering geometrically constructed 1920s dress by Madeleine Vionnet, shown beside a Jean Dunand copper vase; symbolic chrysanthemum patterns as spidery gold embroidery on an emerald green silk 1927 coat by Coco Chanel, or as rich panels of Lyonnais silk. Or there are the Japanese designers' own interpretions in Hanae Mori's calligraphy patterns, Issey Miyake's origami of pleats and the paper-cutout dresses from Comme des Garçons.

The exhibition is in itself a marriage of two cultures, represented by Akiko Fukai, curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute and Fabienne Falluel, curator at the Paris museum. Falluel admits that she has altered the Kyoto focus to include playful pieces that show Japanese influence at its most popular, not to say vulgar. That means including a 19th century poster for an exotic Eastern perfume (complete with parasol and lilies) and cartoon printed kimonos from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's current collection.

The clothing is reinforced with accessories and objects — René Lalique's Art Nouveau decorative hair combs, as well as vases, boxes and screens. One exquisite Edo screen shows folded kimonos; another kitsch 1919 version has a French society beauty against blossom branches.

"My dream was to show fashion along with other objects so that people would realize that we should not think about major and minor works of art," says Falluel. She had a frisson of excitement when she put together a dress by Charles Frederick Worth decorated with the same vivid fish pattern that appeared on a Dunand screen, and when she found a sample of the original butterfly print fabric used for a 1910 Mario Fortuny kimono. Other matches were serendipitous: a chariot-wheel pattern on a Japanese handkerchief and as Comme des Garçon's cutouts, or a Worth cape decorated with samurai helmets as seen in a warrior uniform on display.

The exhibition first informs the visitor about the kimono, its symbolism, its structure, its sleeves. Then the opening display shows Western variations on the theme from a crimson velvet Worth coat scooped away at the nape à la geisha, to John Galliano's 1994 mini kimonos — a sexy slither of skirt below the obi-sash.

Western designers are divided into those seduced by Japanese decoration — all the crysanthemum prints or the exotic fabrics used by Paul Poiret, and those who were fascinated by the kimono's geometry, like Vionnet's green dress cut in flat panels and decorated only with wave-seaming.

"Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes — and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s," said Issey Miyake, who was at the opening party.

"Kimono-mania" swept through fashion in the 19th century, when Japan was opened to the West. Kimonos were cut up and used as decorative fabric for Western dresses, or the corseted body was given a new freedom in kimono house robes made for Liberty of London or copied in India.

"When a new culture comes, people first copy surface decoration, then they study the technique and cut," says Jun Kanai, a curator at Kyoto. "Eventually they assimilate and use it for their own creativity, just as Van Gogh did."

Suzy Menkes
TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1996
(read the rest)