​PASSIONEER

Farewell, My Queen (2012) Told through the eyes of the Queen's reader — a story seen not from the side of the one who wears, but of the one who serves. A film that left me with a lingering unease I can't quite name. Perhaps I felt it all the more because I don't know much about the history surrounding Marie Antoinette. Story aside, I was moved by a glimpse of a scene in which a tapestry is being embroidered. Patient, quiet work — the same in every country. One day, an embroid

The arrow feather pattern is striking. Haikara-san. How nostalgic. A shōjo manga from my school days. In 2017, it came back as an animated film. A manga of Taishō romance, but above all a love story. Next to the anime Demon Slayer, also set in the Taishō era, it feels like an entirely different age. In Haikara-san, petals fly everywhere, and your heart skips a beat. The man the heroine marries is a total heartthrob. The heroine moves freely between Japanese and Western clothe

Official PV (Japanese) I watched Demon Slayer. It is a huge hit out there. I had heard it moves you with its family love and brotherly love. I will set the story aside this time. What caught my attention was the patterns on the kimono the characters wear. Each one is carefully chosen to suit the character's personality. Tanjiro wears ichimatsu, the checkerboard. It is extremely famous. Nezuko wears asanoha, the hemp leaf pattern. So cute. Hemp grows straight and strong. In Ja

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris 【A dress goes to the one who dares to dream. I watched the film. Everywhere, there was the scent of a Paris I remember so fondly. It felt like a dream. It is based on a novel by the English writer Paul Gallico. Mrs. Harris works as a cleaner in London. She is in great demand, and works without rest. One day, at a client's home, she falls in love at first sight with a Dior dress that belongs to the lady of the house. And she decides that she will buy

The same place. Do you call it a maison, or a workshop? I saw it a while ago. You can pretty much guess the plot. The heroine clashes with Madame and storms out of the maison. But she'll come back, surely. Otherwise, the film would be over. (laughs) Even so, the inside of the Dior maison is on screen. That alone made it worth watching. Real handwork lives there. And Madame is, without question, magnificent. In French, it's a "maison." In Japanese, a "workshop." A place where

The other day, this film popped up as a "recommendation" on a streaming service, and I watched it by chance. The trailer pulled me in with the beauty of its hand sewing. I didn't even know what a caftan was. 【On the other side of the world, someone was holding the same needle.】 A caftan (Caftan / Kaftan), it seems, is a loose, long robe that has been worn for centuries across the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa. Its structure, remarkably, is close to a kimono. I felt an

A pattern once sewn as a wish for a child's growth now survives as a single piece of cloth. A pattern once sewn as a wish for a child's growth now survives as a single piece of cloth. Combinaison is made from the same fabric used for nagajuban, the underlayer worn beneath a kimono. On the secondhand market, white and pale pink pieces are everywhere, and they go for next to nothing. Unusual designs and true antiques are the ones everyone wants to keep for themselves, so they r

Nagajuban counts as underwear. Under a Western suit, or under a dress. You would never walk around the house in a nagajuban alone. And there is no fixed rule for what fabric a nagajuban should be made of. Looking at my mother's nagajuban, they are made from chirimen, rinzu, mousseline, hemp — all kinds of materials, and some are remade from haori that had grown too showy to wear as is. A quickened pulse, hidden exactly where no one looks. There is a view that says: it's under

Thread that refuses to be uniform, and is stronger for it. A phrase used when making a bold purchase. Weighing whether the price and the value of the piece are in balance. There are times when that equation simply doesn't hold. The passage of time. Memory. History. The tsumugi I work with. A rustic beauty, different from yuzen. Farmers spun cocoons too flawed to sell during the agricultural off-season, and wore the result as their own clothing. A humble but sturdy garment, on

Made to sit against bare skin, like an extension of the skin itself. The undergarment worn beneath a beautiful kimono is called nagajuban. It too is, by default, 100% silk, hand-sewn. But lately, extreme weather has made Japanese summers unbearably hot. Wearing a full kimono is hard enough in summer as it is. Bras, sleeveless tops, mini skirts. None of that can compete with a kimono when it comes to beating the heat. So summer nagajuban are made of hemp, or skipped altogether

Teaching a curve, little by little, to a cloth that was born straight. Kimono are cut in straight lines. The bolt is roughly 38cm wide, and that is what we use. Making a combinaison from it, that constraint alone creates problems. To let the beauty of drape come through, an A-line is ideal, and it follows the line of the body. There is a famous scene, in an old film, where a dress catches an updraft and billows. We won't go that far. But light, soft fabric clings to the body

No one looks twice. And yet — 100% silk. Thread spun by a silkworm with its life. In wasai, there is a technique called kurimawashi — the art of endless renewal.A kimono is a garment meant to be re-tailored. You unstitch what has been worn thin, and join together whatever still holds its worth, breathing new life into it. The most common example is the nagajuban — the underlayer worn beneath a kimono, pieced together from mismatched scraps of fabric: body, collar, sleeves, ea

I went to reach for my grandmother's katabira — an unlined summer linen kimono — for a reunion dinner with friends I've known since my Paris days. To my surprise, it had torn, right at the seat. There was no shikiate (reinforcing lining) sewn in at all — it truly was an everyday garment, simply made. Perhaps, after all these years, it had finally given out. Seventy years later, my grandmother's katabira has been fully unpicked. Not broken — simply ready to be born again. I he

A grandmother's wish, woven into waves and plovers. Seventy years later, I am the one who wears it. A linen kimono, given to my mother as part of her wedding trousseau. An everyday garment. The occasional slub in the weave reveals it was never a costly piece. It was given to her, along with a man's jōfu, so the newlyweds could pass a summer together. The roundness of the sleeve is soft, impossibly thin — hold it to the sun, and blue sky shows through. Plovers play among the w

The cashmere coat my grandmother left behind. Inside it, a new silk story begins. A silk fabric made for Western clothing. Perhaps a lining for a man's jacket —the kind you'd find in a finely tailored Italian coat.Laid across my palm, it has that smooth, liquid drape.That's silk, unmistakably. It was easy to imagine how it would look lined inside my grandmother's cashmere coat.The real gamble was using it for my son's haori.Could I line it fully? Wouldn't it be too heavy for

A grandmother's cashmere coat, its black wool exterior now lined with French vintage silk — a new life for both. 　 A French friend gave me a piece of silk.It had belonged to her grandmother, kept all these years. A geometric pattern, impossibly smooth, a sheen that moves like liquid.Ah — I can feel the silk's brilliance, its texture, right in my hands. Japanese silk thread, woven in Lyon, I believe. No proof at all. "My grandmother had this, but I don't know when it's from.I

The dissolving horizon of the Mediterranean Sea and the solitary fortress of Château d'if resting on the sleeve. A one-of-a-kind haute couture masterpiece, born from personal sketches and brought to life by the hands of a traditional Yuzen artisan. When I lived in France, I did nothing but sketch. Day after day, intensely. Looking back now, it seems only natural. Picasso, who pioneered Cubism—when you look at his The Weeping Woman, it might look like a mere prankish doodle to

A collection of lines from my youth etched onto traditional large-format French "Raisin" paper. St. Sulpice Church is on the left, and that memorable Rue Mouffetard is on the middle right. During my student days, I spent my time entirely absorbed in drawing and sketching. Plaster busts, nude sketches, and drawings outdoors. I turned my gaze upon various things, capturing and transferring them to paper. Every day, I ran my pencil or pen across the page in a trance. One day, I

My friend in France gave me two Hermès scarves. One was a gift to celebrate the launch of my brand, sent along with a beautiful memory of fireflies. The other is a piece worn and loved by her husband’s aunt years ago—a classic, orthodox design featuring noble figures on horseback. Both are irreplaceable treasures to me. When I think about how deeply the Japanese sericulture industry is historically intertwined with France, these two Hermès scarves become even more profound. B

The ultimate hand-craftsmanship of France: A vintage Hermès silk scarf featuring vibrant insect motifs, gifted by a dear friend in Lyon. An Hermès silk scarf. Today, it is said that Hermès imports its ultra-premium raw silk from Brazil to create these masterpieces. What rests before my eyes is the absolute pinnacle of French hand-craftsmanship. Every time I look at this vivid blue and gold silk, it opens a brilliant drawer of memories from seventeen years ago. In 2009, I visi