​PASSIONEER

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

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