This kimono memoir will help you discover the rich history of the garment that transcends time

The first kimono I saw hung as art was above a staircase. The arms were outstretched like the wooden Jesus. I’d seen in museums, or my mother when she wanted me to run to her. It was tangerine silk. A flock of finely embroidered cranes, white-winged and red-capped, flung into flight across it. The light caught their feathers. I wanted to touch it, to press my face against it. But it was beyond my reach. Perhaps as an adult, I might have been able to grab the hem. It hovered above the hands of the child who did not yet know her multiplication tables. Later, I asked my mother why it was there. She replied that the house owners, an English couple, had spent many years in Japan. My mother had not understood my question. What I had meant was more sweeping: Why would you hang clothes on a wall rather than wear them? Why was it so beautiful, who had made such a thing, who had worn it, was there a chance that I would someday stroke the backs of those birds? Perhaps the mistress of the house might have answered such questions, but I was a little intimidated—she was a creature of gold and glitter. I could not, at the time, relate that finery to the kimono I’d seen on my dead relatives in faded photographs. It seemed both wonderful and entirely foreign, like a dragon perching unexpectedly in a London house.

Another memory: Sitting on the dark parquet floor of my grandparents’ apartment in New York. My grandfather is unwell and it is hard for us to go out. So, we linger indoors. On the table is a bowl of fruit cut for me. All day the television is set to the NHK, the Japanese version of the BBC. My mother is translating the period drama as we watch. There is a rivalry between two court ladies, one rich and cruel, one poorer but good. They encounter each other by chance on a narrow wooden walkway. The rich woman says to the poor: “Nice kimono”. My mother explains this is an insult. The poorer woman has not been able to update her kimono with the season. I am confused. My mother tells me that in Japan at that time, the patterns of your kimono matched the season: Maple leaf for autumn, plum blossom for winter, and so on. This unfortunate woman is out of season and out of place. Later, I will realise that the garment my grandfather was wearing was also a kimono—though it had no seasonal motif. On the rare occasions we go out, he will, with pain and effort, ease into beige trousers and a polo shirt. But in the apartment, he wears his yukata—a thin, unlined kimono, cotton not silk. He wears it over loose pyjamas. It is not chosen for fashion or to impress, but because it is comfortable and light. Heart surgery has left him tired. This kimono will never be exhibited. Yet, it feels closest to the meaning of the term. Break down the parts of kimono and you get ‘wearing’ plus ‘thing’. It’s a simple word, suited to his humble garment. Now he is gone, his bones are no longer able to hold up any fabric. In his funeral portrait, he is wearing a suit, but a decade after his death, I long to loop the yukata’s indigo cloth around my hands.

The reason these kimono memories have flown into my head is because in the spring of 2020, the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) curated an exhibition that showed us the garment from 1660 to the present. I was intrigued by the catalogue. It described the ways kimono allowed wearers to display their stories: Who they were, what they aspired to do, the rules they flouted, and the lines they toed. There’s one story about a 17th-century merchant who had his lands and houses confiscated by the shogun due to his wife’s inappropriately extravagant kimono. I learnt that in the Edo period, there was a fashion for red undergarments and that the bridal headgear from the same era was called a horn concealer, owing to the popular belief that after marriage, the bride would hide her horns of jealousy to be a good wife. Samuel Pepys, the eyewitness to the Great Fire of London, was the owner of a kimono-esque garment. David Bowie was inspired by Japanese dress when designing the clothes for his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, and went so far as to learn how to apply makeup under the guidance of a kabuki actor. I think back to that flock of cranes. I realise it may have been a bridal uchikake—an exquisitely decorated outer kimono worn during the wedding banquet.

After guessing this, it seems suddenly fragile. I imagine a girl, her heart still new, carried by these birds into her future. I think of my grandfather at the end of his life, his hands jittering with Parkinson’s, the words shaking out of his throat. I think that there must have been a final time his long brown arms tucked themselves into indigo blue. I wonder if he knew it was the last. I will go to the show. I will admire the kimono, the wood-block prints, the hair combs, and paintings. I will look and look. I doubt I’ll be able to touch. I hope to glimpse the lives that once filled silk and cotton.