In this January 11, 2018, conversation, noted textile expert Andrea Aranow of Textile Hive and JASA board member John Resig screen images of modern kimono from late Meiji through mid-Showa and hand-painted, life-size zuan produced for cloth to be colored using the figurative technique of yuzen and kata-yuzen. They look at the fascinating story of how tastes changed during the first six decades of the 20th century, hoping this will serve as a companion to Terry Milhaupt‘s excellent scholarly research. They also discuss the role that the kimono played in Japanese art and the impact that art and culture (such as ukiyo-e and kabuki theater) had on the designs of the kimonos.
Andrea Aranow, a JASA member for several years, has a long history playing with textile design questions and answers. She earned a degree at Brown University in cultural history and immediately struck out to create some East Village culture of her own: “funky” snakeskin clothes for the stars of the moment and their followers, then on to reside and build museum collections of “ clothing in Peru, minority China, and finally Japan. Returning to the US in 1987, she ran a commercial business supplying “exotic” textile ideas to industry.
John Resig is a Japanese print collector and creator of the Ukiyo-e.org Japanese woodblock print database. He‘s also a board member of the Japanese Art Society of America and is a Visiting Researcher at Ritsumeikan University.