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A wide selection of vintage & antique Japanese kimonos
and collectables

wafuku - noun: traditional Japanese clothing
~

Examples of 2010 Prices for New Japanese Garments in Japan Check out the photos below to see a contemporary, Japanese tailor's prices. It makes one realise that buying a vintage Japanese kimono gives one a chance to own a beautiful, high quality, genuine Japanese garment at an affordable price when most of us could never hope to buy one brand new. I was looking at the garments offered by this Japanese tailor, where you select the roll of silk with a design you like on it and the tailor sews it into the kimono, haori, michiyuki, obi, hakama etc. that you require. The pictures below show some of the items available at that tailor shop and the price for each (current on 24 January 2010). Tailoring a kimono is called wasai and it takes one to two months just to hand tailor a kimono, add to that the time it takes for the textile art to be applied to the fabric, by various artisans, and the fact that most kimonos are silk and you begin to realise why a kimono can easily cost as much as a small car and why the Japanese take such care of them and expect each to be used by at least three generations. Women's kimonos. For an extra expensive kimono textile, there is the shibori and tsujigahana. Shibori is a very intricate, time consuming and skilled form of tie dye work and tsujigahana is shibori with added, hand applied detailing; for example, outlines, painted colour or embroidery. You can read more about Shibori and Tsujigahana Design Techniques, with information and a brief video clip on that page Men's kimonos. Women's obi items & douura. Zori and Children's kimonos. You can see from those prices why the Japanese take such care of their kimonos and other traditional garments and why so many of my vintage ones are in such pristine condition, even though between 30 and 100 years old, as most of mine are. Their value means the Japanese store them very carefully; folded along the seams and stored in cedarwood chests (if they can afford those) or with mothballs, cedarwood essential oil or lavender essential oil placed nearby to ward off moths. They are also stored out of sunlight, often stitched round the edges with shitsuke to keep the edges flat during storage and they are aired every season. Most high quality kimonos are stll entirely hand tailored, with no machine stitching, so that they can be completely unpicked and the pieces individually cleaned, then hand sewn back together again; this traditional method of cleaning is called araihari. The more recent of my vintage cotton yukata kimonos and synthetic silk odori kimonos might be machine stitched, as they may be intended to be worn and washed more often, but many of those are hand sewn too. Hand tailoring, along with textile design, hand printed textiles and so on, means these garments are, inevitably, extremely expensive, especially if they are entirely made of silk. A yuzen textile can require several artists in its production; an artist to create the design, one to apply the rice paste to mask off areas from dyes, one to dye the entire fabric bolt, one to paint the base areas of the design onto the masked areas of the dyed silk, one to do outlines, one to do shading, one to apply lacquer or embroidery etc, and that is just the preparation of the textile, the kimono still has to be made from the bolt of fabric. Suddenly, the price of a great condition, vintage kimono or haori seems inexpensive for the garment one is getting. Back to top Information Pages 1 About Kimonos 2 Japanese Womenswear 3 Japanese Menswear 4 Further Kimono Information 5 Wearing and Folding Women's Japanese Garments 6 Types of Women's Kimono. Geisha & Maiko 7 Japanese Eras (Periods) 8 Uses for Japanese Kimono Fabrics 9 Adjusting Kimono Length 10 Lots of Great Links To How To Wear Kimonos & Tie Obis 11 Types of Obi 12 Types of Kimonos - Picture Reference 13 How to fold an Origami Kimono - Picture Reference I have furoshiki tying instructions here There is also a lot of information on my Wafuku blog. This link opens in a new window, leaving this window open