Product Description

This work traces the history of the Kimono - its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance - and in doing so explores the world of the geisha, last wearers of the kimono. The colourful and stylized kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses Japanese fashion and design taste, and also reveals the soul of Japan. Many today consider the kimono impractical, discarded by men for suits and ties a century ago, it is now only worn occasionally by women.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216665 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From the Publisher
By the author of the bestselling Geisha
‘She offers a tour of the cultural collisions that have become part of the fabric not just of the kimono but of modern Japan. It is a tour well worth taking’ Wall Street Journal

In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book Liza Dalby traces the history of the kimono – its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance.

The colourful and stylised kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses not only Japanese fashion and design taste but also reveals something of the soul of Japan and is seen by many as a symbol for all that is Japanese – simplicity, elegance and beauty. Amazingly beautiful, the kimono has gone through many changes in the centuries since it was first imported from China, changes that reflect the way that Japanese society has also developed over the ages.

‘An impressive, unusual and beautiful book. There are many valuable insights here – not only about Japanese clothing but also about patterns of gender, class and identity in Japanese culture’ Joseph J. Tobin, author of Re-Made in Japan

‘A lively, informative study of the kimono, tracing its evolution throughout Japanese history to its current status as the national dress of Japan…At once scholarly and enjoyable reading’ Journal of Japanese Studies

About the Author
Liza Dalby is an anthropologist specialising in Japanese culture and the only Westerner to have become a geisha. She is the author of Tale of Murasaki and is a consultant on Steven Spielberg's film of Memoirs of a Geisha. She lives in California with her husband and three children.

Customer Reviews

Great pictures, good insight
...I have to be honest I bought this book because Liza Dalby wrote the introduction and because Arthur Golden was quoted saying it was a good book. Having read the books by Liza Dalby and Arthur Golden I wanted to see some pictures of kimono and geisha that were more than just pretty pictures. And that's exactly what this book does, it gives you 120 beautiful pictures and a lot of information.

The book is divided into sections: 1. The use of kimono in festivals, 2. Kimono you see in the street, 3. Production (weaving,spinning, dyeing), 4. The commercial side of kimono (fitting, kimono shops), 5. Maiko and Geisha (including some wonderful pictures made at the Nyokoba Geisha Training school in Kyoto), 6. Men wearing kimono (storytellers, sumo referees, tea ushers, monks) 7. Kabuki (this is my favorite. You see a kabuki player back stage getting dressed for a female role) 8. Work (the kimono as a uniform) 9. Footwear (an interesting detail) Apart from the beautiful pictures this book has an informative introduction by Liza Dalby and with each picture you get a caption that gives you some little piece of insight that changes the way you look at the picture. Having been to Japan this book to me is a souvenir of some of the things I've seen, the people wearing kimono in the street, the festivals. But it also showed me some things I could never see (the behind the stage kabuki pictures and the manufacturing of the kimono). If you have been to Japan you too will recognize some of these pictures. If you have not been to Japan this book gives you a great impression of what to expect (kimono wise that is). Last but not least the book has a beautiful design, it's a great coffee table book.

Very well researched, though quite dated
As someone who wears kimono almost everyday, I found the book informative and fascinating. The research concerning the history of Kimono developement is absolutely fantastic.
As always, she is most brilliant when dealing with Japanese history rather than modern Japan.

When she starts talking about "modern Japanese society", it often sounds extremely 1970-80s and what she calls "Japanese mentality" to me looks like the characteristics of a generation or two above.
All in all, I find them boring and having no resemblance to the reality as I know it in Japan.
(If you can imagine yourself meeting a Japanese who had been to the UK in 1970s and firmly believed some of the hippies' styles as "essentially British", you would see the slight dizziness I felt in reading some of her comments.)

As for the kimono in our life, although she makes a point that it has more or less completely dissappeared, they are making a new come back. Observations of a foreign culture is a difficult thing. Just like milk, they have sell-by date and once it's gone, they start smelling rather bad.
But perhaps I should not be too harsh on those points.
After all, the book itself was first published quite some time ago. And, as I have already stated at the beginning, the research itself is absolutely brilliantly done.

Not just a pretty dress
'Kimono: Fashioning Culture' is much more than the story of a single garment. A dynamic blend of fashion, social history and anthropology, the book traces the evolution of Japanese self-identity through the kimono. Dalby offers a carefully researched history of kimono, mouth-watering excerpts from a seventeenth-century Japanese fashion magazine, interviews with modern kimono wearers, and illustrations that are informative rather than blandly pretty.
Far from being a stable, tradition-bound political and cultural symbol, the kimono has passed in and out of fashion, changing to suit its times and wearers. Dalby deftly dissects the subtle differences-the length of a sleeve, the placement of a collar-that proclaim a woman's age, class, marital status, and personal taste.
Dalby writes about the look and feel of kimono with the authority of personal experience; while researching her doctoral dissertation in a geisha community in Kyoto (the basis of her previous book, Geisha), she wore kimono every day. Indeed, geisha are the only women who still wear kimono on a daily basis, and Dalby points out that the fates of geisha and kimono are intertwined: 'Whether or not a Japanese has ever met a geisha or used her specialized service (and most have not), a feeling remains that Japan would be losing something unique and precious by allowing geisha to disappear. Kimono has a similar hold on the Japanese imagination.' After reading Dalby's insightful account, it is easy to see why.