Whether it's adorning samurais and geishas or pop stars and haute couture designers, the kimono is not just a traditional costume but a dynamic piece of fashion. A new exhibition at Paris’ Quai Branly Museum highlights how the iconic Japanese garment has transcended categories and cultures.
The Kimono exhibition, which first appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2020, aims to revisit the history of the outfit.
"I think in the West particularly, we don't really have a very full understanding of what kimono is. We tend to see it as a sort of timeless, traditional costume," Anna Jackson, chief curator of the Asia department at the V&A, told RFI.
"In fact, the kimono has always been a very dynamic item of fashion."
'Thing to wear'
Literally named "thing to wear", the kimono appeared more than a thousand years ago in Japan.
By the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1868), it was worn throughout the country.
The merchant class contributed to the increase in its production, while the samurai warrior class wore the most luxurious ones.
"The kimono has got quite a long history in Japan, but from the 17th century, it was the principle item of dress for everyone in Japan, regardless of their gender or their social status," Jackson said.
"In Western aesthetics, we tend to think of our clothes as either concealing or emphasizing particular parts of the body, even for men as much as for women [...] whereas that's not important in kimono.
"In Japanese clothing, the body is irrelevant and it is the flat surface of the kimono that is important. Colour, pattern and technique indicate status and taste."
Japan's first fashion icons
During the Edo period, entertainers such as kabuki actors and geishas became the first Japanese fashion icons.
"When we think of fashion, there's still a tendency to think of it as a European invention," Jackson says.
"We particularly wanted to show that a fashion has flourished elsewhere in the world, particularly in Japan, from the 17th century."
The kimono has had an important effect on dress styles around the world over the past 400 years, particularly in Europe.
"We tend to think of global fashion and global exchange as something that is recent, but it's been going on for centuries," Jackson explains.
Emerging exports
With the opening of Japan to foreign trade in the 1850s, kimonos were exported to the West, where shoppers marvelled at the "exotic" outfits.
At the early 20th century, wearing kimono became a global trend and the textile technology introduced from Europe sped up production and lowered costs.
"The Japanese knew what they were doing when they exported kimono in the late 19th century. They were doing it because they realised that here was an emerging market, an emerging economy," according to Jackson.
"Japan has always had agency about how it has exported its dress and how it speaks of its dress in a foreign context," she says.
Japan could not sell heavy industry and so to survive in a global world, it found things that it could sell – kimono and textiles.
Revival and reinvention
After World War II, most people in Japan started to wear Western dress. Kimono became much more of a codified costume, worn for special occasions like graduations, weddings or tea ceremonies.
But in the last 15 years there has been a real revival in kimono culture in Japan, which is one of the motivations behind this exhibition.
"That really stemmed actually from the street, where younger Japanese were possibly bored with global fashion," Jackson says.
"Every shop in the world sells the same kind of clothes and really thinking more about sustainability, less about false fashion, new Japanese designers started to sort of find vintage garments and styled them up in new ways."
Ever since the 1950s, the world's fashion designers have transformed the kimono: in Japan, Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano in Britain or Cameroonian designer Serge Mouangue, to name just a few.
Pop stars such as Freddy Mercury, David Bowie and Björk have all worn kimono, and Star Wars costume designers were inspired by it.
But in some cases, this adoptoin of the kimono has led to accusations of cultural appropriation.
Crossing cultural boundaries
"There is obviously quite a fine line between cultural appreciation and appropriation," says Jackson, who told RFI that she and her fellow curators considered such issues when they were designing the exhibition.
"But I think with the argument that you should only wear the kimono in a certain way, it kind of essentialises the kimono and denies its own very dynamic fashion history... [and] 400 years of crossing cultural boundaries that the kimonos have shown," she tells RFI.
As part of gathering kimonos for the exhibition, Jackson says she met young Japanese designers and asked them how they would feel about Westerners wearing the outfit.
Far from being offended, "that is something they celebrate because of course, they want their industry to survive," she says.
"And it would only survive, really, if [the kimono] becomes an item of fashion, not if it becomes something revered and restricted."
► Kimono runs until 28 May 2023 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
