"Kimonos" in the 47 ronin

I've been watching trailers, costume featurette and images of the new 47 ronin movie with Keanu Reeves and I feel personally that even though the kimono for men is rather nice, the kimono for women is like a nail on a blackboard. So, after a long silence on my blog, I felt like I should write something about period clothing during that time.

47 ronin is a story that starts in the 18th century, or 1702, which is nearly the middle of Edo period (Tokugawa shogunate). It's the Golden Age of the Floating Worlds as merchants are becoming richer and money flows to the bordelles. Courtesans are becoming the Divas of the Day, the fashion icons that the ladies of the town are imitating. Ladies of court and nobility cling to old principles of dress. Women's clothing refomation happened in  1722.


Let's have a look at the movie costumes shall we?

What I can see is very nice, off-the-shoulders dress with elizabethan sleeves and something that might be considered a waist cincer rather than actual obi, as it accentuates the shape of the waist and the pelvis. Also, the skirtlike hem is more chinese hanfu/ korean hanbok than Edo period kimono. Also, I'm a bit offended by the colored collar on the right. It was popular during mid-Edo period to wear black collar on your kimono so oil-stains from your hair would not show. Yellow kihachiyo collars could have been seen nearer 1900's on Tokyo's modern youth with Gibson Girl hairdo's.

I feel like that collar is offending me on a personal level. I mean what is it doing in a kimono? I can relate it to the collar worn by high government officials, warriors in court dress etc. but highly exaggerated. I don't think I've ever seen a woman wear such a garment, only men. Also, I keep wondering if the collars we see of the costume underneath are of a juban, or another kimono. If it's another kimono, all I can ask is, where the bloody hell are your undergarments!?
There's also no opening in the back of those sleeves. But during 1702, there was no hanging sleeves. Sleeve's detached themselves from the sides of the kosode somewhere around 1770, which was the final kickstart for the obi to expand to it's full glory.

Also, the musubi in the last image resembles the fukura suzume musubi except that the end is left hanging. I'd like to point out that during this time period, the obi is still barely over 6 inches wide. Women's obi in 1730 was about 10 inches and by 1800's it's widened to the foot wide obi we know today. But back to the topic. Obi was floppy and the knots were floppy. Why? Because most of the known helps for tying the obi today didn't exist! Meaning that tying the fukura suzume in 1702 was more or less impossible. Also the obi in the picture is clearly wider than 6 inches.

This would have been closer to the style of the day:

As you see, the obi is a loose knot, the sleeves are still relatively small, but the hem of the kimono needs to be hiked up for walking. The dressing is done in layers, you can spot atleast 3 layers on the bottom right image.

I seriously hope this scene was flipped for the featurette or then the people are The Walking Dead. I keep wondering if the costume of Mika is supposed to resemble the junihitoe which was the official dress for ladies of the court. There's some sleeve similarities, but I am not even going to talk about the collar.

Ladies in the background are wearing dildos on their heads.

I'm not saying it's not accurate. There was this sort of hairstyle in the history. And they actually did do some research on courtesans (WHOA), because this was the hairstyle used by courtesans during Muromachi period. Also the ladies seem to be wearing something that looks like men's kataginu on top of their kimono. And again with the long sleeves.... Obis atleast are more period accurate.

Need I even start with this? First of all there's the cleavage. Until westernazation the japanese did not consider the cleavage worth the erotic symbol it's in the west. "You got boobs, so what?". What was erotic in Japan those days was the back of the neck, the underside of the wrist and the peak of naked toes under the many layers of a courtesans kimonos. Not boobs. And I'm sure brassiere was not invented until 1900's after the decline of the corset. I could also say something about those medieval princess sleeves you can easilly spot on the top image.

Also the kimono in the lower image resembles more hanfu, with the flowing skirt hem, than an actual kimono of the feodal Japan. Which is a shame because the men's costumes look so nice. There's probably mistakes on those too, but I was practicly blinded by the shock from the ladies kimonos.

I shall end my rant now.

I got another gradient kimono!

Got myself another gradient striped kimono! Yes! Come to me baby! Now I have a (near) twin sister of my green/grey gradient komon.

Image of the seller's auction.

I got a new obidome! And a new tsuke obi!

From GirLinKimono on Etsy.


I also sewed a new tsuke obi for myself. I've been planning a lot of kimono related things to come. I'm starting japanese lessons next week and I am planning to wear kimono to the lessons. If not for anything else, I can get to wear kimono a week. <3

One side is dark chocolate brown polka dot pattern and the other one is dark blue-white gingham. Now to plan a kitsuke ensemble!

GISHWHES kimono

Hjallo!
GISHWHES has ended and we are allowed to submit our glorious insanity for all the internet. God help you all.

Item #120 Your most dramatic interpretation of "Death by Chocolate"! As a Pratchettian, this was just toooooo gooooood to pass by without doing it! (if you don't know what I mean, go read Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, trust me, you're going to love it!).

I dug out my old white halloween/cosplay kimono that I made YEARS ago and was never happy with it. Why? I knew I was going to be laying down on a grass, and grass stains are a pain to get off... Also, death + white kimono = need I say more?

Just goofing off and daydreaming about chocolate. You can see I even dressed R-over-L. What you cannot see is that it's raining. Really hard and the grass was really wet, so it's a good thing I'm not wearing a more precious kimono. That's a young apple tree I'm leaning against.

Practising my Death pose...  And what I learned? It's damn difficult to smudge your face with chocolate on purpose!

This is the actual submission image. There's something rather Romeo&Juliet like in it... I just realized it...

The other item we did on the same day was #49 Take the road less travelled.

We shot these before the Death images. It was raining pretty hard so I decided that I would not wear the pretty green kimono I planned earlier. Because it is a silk kimono and I didn't want to get it wet.

New things arriving

I haven't been kimono shopping in what feels for ages! I even bid in an auction, and won!

The first one has dirt spots, but I'm hoping they won't be so prominent in the actual garment.

And I got another white based odori kimono. I seem to have a thing for these. For my next trick I might try getting more people into kimono, dress them in all of my odori kimonos and take a group photo. Oh, it would be wonderful! I just need a few more juban and dressing accessories.

Images are from the sellers auctions.

It's all Asian right?

NO.

The point of today's post is about cultural diversity in traditional clothing. In Asia. Meaning mostly China, Japan and Korea. These three get mixed up all the time. What made me write this post is the fact that I'm actually rather tired of hearing "chinese" when in full kimono. And while explaining, get the comment of "Well, it's Asian so I wasn't that far off!". No, you were just a whole culture off.

China

First let's look at China, since the the kimono of Japan and the hanbok of Korea both shaped themselves from it.

Hanfu

Hanfu, like the kimono, has many varieties and formalities. There are probably people more knowledgable than me on this, and even a small google search will give you quite a lot of answers. It is said that hanfu's history might go back  even as far as three millenias.

The hanfu also has three layers of formality: Informal, semi-formal and formal. A typical hanfu outfit is two to three layers, but during formalities, there can be more layers.

There are two types of formal wear, shenyi. The top one is for men and the bottom one is for women. You can easilly spot the differences in the sleeves and how the hem is shaped. The female version is a lot more of the "wrap-around" kind than the men's. The women's shenyi portrayed in this picture is called a guju and the men's shenyi a zhiju.

This is a type of informal wear for women, a ruqun. You can clearly spot the similarities of the garment to the Korean hanbok.

Cheongsam / Qípáo

Most people I've met associate the cheongsam as the traditional garment of China, even if the garment was created in 1920s in Shanghai for upperclass ladies and sociaties.

Nowadays it's still widely in use as uniforms and workclothes. Some airline hostess' uniform is a cheongsam. The garment in itself bears a striking resemblance to the traditional vietnamese áo dài:

Áo dài

Korea

Hanbok / Chosŏn-ot

Korean traditional dress is typically a short vest/jacket and a long skirt.  There are two different names for the same garment as the hanbok is used in the South and Chosŏn-ot is used in the North. Hanbok was born during the Chosŏn dynasty. The high officials and the aristocracy changed their styles according to foreign styles, but the commonwealth kept using the garment we today know as the hanbok. It's used in semi-formal and formal occasions nowadays.

You can see how much the style resembles the informal chinese ruqun dress, with the jacket and the skirt.

Japan

Kimono

Japan probably has the most known (appart from the cheongsam) traditional dress of these three, the kimono. In western speech a wrap-around clothing is instantly named a "kimono". A kimono is T-shaped garment that one wraps around to dress and ties it with a wide belt called obi. Female kimono is a lot longer than the men's and it varies in styles and formalities. Kimono comes with three formalities, just like the hanfu: Informal, semi-formal and formal.

 
For more information on kimono, you can go to my post on types of Kimono

I could go on an on, about the Asian traditional dresses but let's stop for now. The hanfu, section became longer than I wanted, but there was just so much information...  I hope I made it clear about which dress goes to which culture. Thank you and have a nice summer day!

Wave odori with yellow accessories

I'm sloooowly turning to the wave odori for the graduation kitsuke. But I wanted different accessories than the white obiage and white/blue obijime. A trip to the local fabric store provided me with a yellow/orange cotton fabric for obiage and dark reddish gold "obijime".

Now I'm only pondering, wether to leave the juban collar white, or make it blue...