second hand rose

simultaneous with ukiyo-e, was chiyogami, printed with woodblocks, just like the prints.

one story has it that the prints were "discovered" as they were used as wrapping paper; chiyogami was created as wrapping paper!

considered as decorative rather than narrative, the collections and comments are far rarer than are those for ukiyo-e. i'll recommend some great books; if you want the whole story, it really is all over the internet.

it was used for bookbinding and toy-making as well as for wrapping gifts. when i first saw chiyogami, i felt aha! i have found the missing link.

but researching this post, at this moment in my life (of which there is always one), has opened up in me more questions than i would ever answer.

and i ask, should i always want to? the brain may wonder, and allow that to be it. does everyone have to be a scholar?

perhaps i will list some of the questions: why is all of the western design i see so orderly? do the japanese prints seem orderly to the japanese?

why do color combinations and print pairings seem so often off-kilter to my eyes; we would never wear that print with that one. see all the kimono prints. do the japanese see the west as having an odd sense of color and coordination in a look?

what about the wiener werkstatte allowed more chaos in design than other western styles of the time? why do a blog? to look things up in wikipedia or books? to parrot informative information?

why have we insisted upon answers and orderliness? have we understood anything about the japanese at all? stop thinking.

just.

stop.

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

the travels of inspiration

one of the things morse brought back with him when he returned from japan was a notebook of kimono pattern designs from 1734.

it had been created by Ôoka Shunboku, who "was one of the first artists to expand painting techniques to a broader audience through publishing monochromatic block-printed books, painting manuals, and other handbooks." 1

the designs in this collection were ostensibly created for wood-carving, but they were charming enough that they were chosen for fabric design, metalwork, room-divider screens, and much else.

interestingly, it would appear that this volume's reach, both geographically and chronologically, was certainly broader than he'd likely ever imagined. enter arthur silver and the silver studio.

from photographs we have of his home, we see that
silver collected and displayed treasures from japan.
his company, the silver studio, produced thousands
of designs for everything from textiles
and wallpaper to silver and jewelry.

the silver studio was on retainer to arthur lazenby liberty's department store, liberty. they provided many of the items they produced to liberty's solely. both men were instrumental in introducing japanese goods, and styles, to the growing middle class. liberty was to england as bing was to france.

we know this book was brought to the west early in the days of japan's trade with the west. is it such a reach that a collector such as silver might have gotten his hands on a copy?

of course, since it was one of the first multi-copy publications coming out of japan, it's also possible that that many others saw it as well. seemingly inspired textile designs came out of northern england, france, and the wiener werkstatte as well.




fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it:

Japan and British Art Nouveau, 1880-1900
July 2009 - Feb 2010, Middlesex

An exhibition exploring the influence of Japanese motifs and techniques on British Art Nouveau, with particular reference to the design output of the Silver Studio. The West London-based Silver Studio was founded by Arthur Silver, who during the 1880s and 90s was heavily interested in and influenced by the art of Japan. The exhibition will feature many Japanese and Japanese-inspired objects from the Silver Studios collection, and explore ideas around cross-fertilisation and the way in which design influences were shared between two very different cultures. 2

liberty, in more ways than one

(did arthur lazenby liberty start the arts and crafts movement, or just give it a home, as did bing in paris to art nouveau. again we see the newly-arisen middle class supporting an entrepreneurial class who was able to create, support, make a living from, and otherwise bring or exploit new tastes and standards to the buying publics. both men did importing as well as encouraging new, local, design. we look at dresses.)

General dress reform movement was sup- ported by a conglom- eration of many different ideological groups, including

health advocates and feminists. In the early nineteenth century, concern arose about the distortion of internal organs and the circulatory problems caused by the tight lacing of corsets. Also of concern was the general inability of women and girls to get decent exercise because of petticoats, long trains, and the heavy structural paraphernalia worn under clothing. The excessive weight of the fabric carried by fashionably dressed women was a problem as well. In response to these concerns, the Rational Dress Society was founded in 1881. Its vision was encapsulated in an article in the Society’s Gazette:

The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible; and of all tie down cloaks or other garments impeding on the movements of the arms. It protests against crinolines or crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming….



[It] requires all to be dressed healthily, comfortably, and beautifully, to seek what conduces to health, comfort and beauty in our dress as a duty to ourselves and each other.

Ultimately, women’s issues of comfort, health, and freedom of movement were more forceful and lasting influences on dress reform than were aesthetic issues, although dress reform, as a wider cultural phenomenon, did reject Victorian frippery, harsh aniline dye colors and stiff fabrics. Artistic dress in particular adopted soft, flowing fabrics in muted colors, called “Art Colors” by Liberty of London, called “strange, old-fashioned, and indescribable” by critics. Unlike styles derived from French fashions, artistic dress had very little embellishment, limited mostly to smocking and simple, free-style embroidery. Liberty of London provided beautiful silks and woolens for artistic clothing, and eventually carried artistic gowns in their in-store boutique, The Liberty & Co. Artistic and Historic Costume Studio, opened in 1884. Several years later Liberty & Co. challenged the supremacy of French fashion by presenting aesthetic gowns at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universalle. 1

brimful of starlight

THE INDIAN UPON GOD

I PASSED along the water's edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light,
the rushes round my knees,

My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs;
and saw the moorfowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope,
and saw them cease to chase
Each other round in circles,
and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill
and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl,
and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing,

the moonbeams from His eye.

I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it,
He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made,
and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain
between His petals wide.

A little way within the gloom
a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck;
for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?

I passed a little further on
and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

William Butler Yeats


(Yeats never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority of Ireland’s Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to study in myriad other subjects including theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabbalah.)

the actual clothes: photos that tell the tale

the camera had only recently been invented, and was, in fact, an influence on art and the arts veering from a prettified realism. so we are lucky there are any photos at all of women's fashion from this time.

In 1907, according to Common Threads, A Parade of American Clothing, Anna G. Noyes, who many considered an eccentric, pleaded for a new order of clothing in which women didn't need help getting in and out of clothes, a method of equally distributing the weight of clothes so they would be and feel as natural to the body as skin and bones and an overall design based on the natural curves of the body. She also wanted the right for women to select textile colors best suited to their coloring, to choose fabrics for garments which touched the body that were sanitary and could easily be washed and the elimination of dirty starch; to wear gloves instead of bothersome muffs in the winter, more becoming hats less prone to ridicule, better fitting shoes and the elimination of all jewelry and fur in warm climates which prevented fresh air from penetrating the body.

But most of all she touched upon the very heart of reform by campaigning to eliminate articles of clothing that required unsafe or unhealthy working conditions for workers, a subject many were advocating but went largely ignored by local city officials -- the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City in 1911 would forever be a haunting reminder of those unheeded warnings.

Thus the timing was right for the entrance of the kimono American style - its structure and simplicity embodied an age of new spirit and freedom. Although fashion reform was slow to move until the early 1920s as society makers continued to decree that woman should be corseted, stuffed and layered, the carefree look was making serious inroads. (more)