À la recherche du temps perdu — The Blue Caftan
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 instant kinship.
Collars, cuffs and hems are covered in lavish hand embroidery, each piece competing in beauty. When I saw that painstaking handwork, I kept pressing the replay button, again and again.
In the film, an old-school craftsman struggles.
He is torn between customers who want things cheap and fast.
His wife looks reality in the eye to protect their shop and their livelihood.
The husband wants to make work that lasts a hundred years, work that can be handed down.
That's how it looked to me.
And the way this couple has walked side by side, as partners, was beautiful.
There were so many moving scenes. Along with the beauty of the caftans, they overlapped with my own circumstances, and I found myself nodding along again and again. I felt sad, too, wondering whether the state of hand sewing is the same all over the world, and left with complicated feelings.
The kimono and coats I make are no different.
If possible, I want to do work that the next generation can be proud of fifty years from now.
And yet: "Now! Just make it cheap! Use the sewing machine!"
That reality exists, and I understand that feeling.
Even so, there are always some people who choose the thing that took time.
I'm grateful that, on the other side of the earth, there are people carrying the same worry.
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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