Furisode and So-Hitta

By ROBERT HUGHES

In a time of ready-to-wear, mass-produced clothes, the kimono of old Japan seems a fabled anachronism, like phoenix feathers. In the Edo period, for example, between the early 17th and middle 19th centuries, the art of designing and dyeing those full-sleeved, sashed garments reached its peak. Fortunes were expended on kimono by merchants and nobles, whose wives might, on formal occasions, wear 20 layers of shimmering robes. Since the 8th century they have been the stuff of poetry:

Whose sleeves do you enfold

While leaving me to lie here

Night after night

Alone on my widest robe?

The first character of this verse by the 11th century Lady Sagami, "Tagasode: whose Sleeves . . .," has been adopted as the title of the spring exhibition that opens this week at New York's Japan House Gallery. It consists of 43 elaborate Edo-period kimono, chosen from 11,000 examples from Japan's foremost private collection. Almost all the techniques of kimono making -- especially the two major ones, tie-dyeing and resist-dyeing -- are on view in examples of the highest quality (see color).

The show illustrates how immaterial the distinction the West draws between art and craft was in traditional Japanese culture: a kosode, or small-sleeved robe -- like the 17th century garment in two colors of figured satin, the jagged yellow sheet sweeping diagonally upward across its black ground -- is as satisfying a work of art as any scroll or painted screen. Some kimono are filmy and almost blank, with patterns and emblems grouped in small areas. Others, like the takarazukushi, or "myriad treasures" robes, swarming with thousands of embroidered good-luck symbols, look thick enough to stand up on their own.

Whatever the material or the subject, the sense of design never falters. Nor the painstaking labor required of kimono makers. The most difficult technique was known as so-hitta, or overall tie-dyeing. The word suggests rich hippies in blotchy homemade tank tops, but the Japanese craftsmen of the Edo period raised this system of knotting and immersion-dyeing to a most taxing pitch of subtlety. The furisode ("swinging sleeves" kimono), with its design of a lone pine tree running up the back, required hundreds of thousands of knots, each placed with fanatical precision so that the untied (and hence colored) portions of the fabric made the "drawing" of the design. Each knot was tied over the point of a silver nail and had to be removed with diminutive scissors.

Perpetual Discontent. Only one craftsman could work on the kimono since, as Textile Historian Nishimura Hyobu remarks in the catalogue notes, "a change of workers -- or even a brief illness -- could result in an irreparable alteration of the rhythm of the tying and the evenness of the results." The knots took more than a year to tie and another year to undo, one by one. Because the process cost so much, the making of so-hitta was outlawed by the Japanese sumptuary laws of 1683, which attempted to control extravagance in clothing. But the tie-dyed kimono remain, frail monuments to man's perpetual discontent with his own skin.

Robert Hughes

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