​PASSIONEER

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