kimono club blog

books and boba

Another gorgeous and slightly overheated day in San Jose found Kimono Club members meeting over boba at SincereTea to exchange books and chat about photography, looks, and history. At this point we’re assembling a small library of volumes ranging from the academic to the purely artistic. When you’re looking for texts on kimonos, it’s OK to judge a book by its cover.

Shout out to our newest member, Paul Obuno, for taking the photo of our table, by the way. He makes us look hipper than we actually are.

sometime in August, 2021

stacks to distract: what we’re reading part II

Mel picked up some of these volumes recently, so we’re looking forward to digging in:

Keiko Nitanai’s Kimono Design

Katsumi Yumioka’s Kimono and the Colors of Japan

Manami Okazaki’s Kimono Now

sometime in July, 2021

stacks to distract: what we’re reading part I

Terry Satsuki Milhaupt has written an informed account of the kimono as a product of early modern Japanese history. The book is exhaustive in its research and features plenty of references for historians who might be looking to follow up on Satsuki Milhaupt’s insights. Although pictorially rich, this book is intended for a serious reader of Japanese textile history. Notes on dyeing practices, fabric types, division of labor, and regional practices shape a holistic perspective of the kimono’s history as a definitively modern and culturally complex Japanese garment. Satsuki Milhaupt also spends time illuminating the West’s fraught relationship with the kimono as an icon of the exotic Asian “Other,” providing examples from 19th century European art and historical travelogues. Concurrently, her analysis of textile/kimono history also includes some discussion of the kimono’s not-so-humble role in the larger project of nation-making. Overall, Satsuki Milhaupt has produced a thorough and nuanced portrait of the kimono as a garment, construct, and craft object poised as much for reinvention as antiquity.

Japantown Kimono Club honors the late Satsuki Milhaupt and the work of her husband, Curtis J. Milhaupt, who edited and published her research as the book that we hold today.

sometime in July, 2021