À la recherche du temps perdu — From Underwear to a Gown
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 rarely come cheap.
The asanoha (hemp-leaf) pattern in particular carries a meaning long tied to baby clothing.
For Japanese people, the asanoha pattern is auspicious. Hemp grows fast and strong without needing much care, so for generations, parents sewed newborns into asanoha-patterned garments as a wish for healthy growth. Those same garments eventually became a young woman's nagajuban. Today, with modern medicine, that anxious prayer has largely faded, and few parents dress their children in asanoha anymore.
Even with nagajuban, everyone already owns one in white or pink, so a second or third piece calls for a different pattern — which is exactly why white and pink flood the secondhand market.
As the habit of wearing kimono has faded, these pieces are the ones that were left sleeping in a grandmother's dresser.
Global warming hasn't helped either — kimono simply run hot now, and a growing number of people dislike sweating through silk, which has pushed synthetic alternatives onto the market.
And yet nothing rivals the suppleness of rinzu against bare skin. It settles you into a quiet, almost dreamlike calm.
That Japanese silk is prized as loungewear in the West is something you can trace straight through film.
The habutae and rinzu used for kimono and nagajuban cross the ocean and come back to life on screen as a "gown." Al Pacino wears a lustrous silk robe in House of Gucci, and Alain Delon left behind a still of his own, wearing a crested habutae robe as loungewear.
In a film I watched just recently, the lead wore the same kind of lustrous silk piece as a gown. Cut as a kimono, it's "wafuku." Worn as loungewear, it's a "gown." The name changes, but underneath it, it's the same sheen — the same single piece of cloth.
So that everyone can feel this same suppleness for themselves.
Waking Sleeping Beauty from her hundred years of sleep.
You may never wear a kimono. But you can wear the art of Wasai.
On ne porte pas forcément un kimono. Mais on peut porter l'art du Wasai.
— PASSIONEER
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