Japan’s engagement with Western clothing, culture, and art in the mid-nineteenth century transformed the traditional kimono and began a cross-cultural sartorial dialogue that continues to this day. This publication explores the kimono’s fascinating modern history and its notable influence on Western fashion. Initially signaling the wearer’s social position, marital status, age, and wealth, older kimono designs gave way to the demands of modernized and democratized twentieth-century lifestyles as well as the preferences of the emancipated “new woman.” Conversely, inspiration from the kimono’s silhouette liberated Western designers such as Paul Poiret and Madeline Vionnet from traditional European tailoring. Juxtaposing never-before-published Japanese textiles from the John C. Weber Collection with Western couture, this book places the kimono on the stage of global fashion history.

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer. Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foundations of the modern kimono fashion industry. It explores the crossover between ‘art’ and ‘fashion’ in this period at the hands of famous Japanese painters who worked with clothing pattern books and painted directly onto garments. With Japan’s exposure to Western fashion in the nineteenth century, and Westerners’ exposure to Japanese modes of dress and design, the kimono took on new associations and came to symbolize an exotic culture and an alluring female form. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the kimono industry was sustained through government support. The line between fashion and art became blurred as kimonos produced by famous designers were collected for their beauty and displayed in museums, rather than being worn as clothing. Today, the kimono has once again taken on new dimensions, as the Internet and social media proliferate images of the kimono as a versatile garment to be integrated into a range of individual styles. Kimono: A Modern History, the inspiration for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,not only tells the story of a distinctive garment’s ever-changing functions and image, but provides a novel perspective on Japan’s modernization and encounter with the West.

The Kimono in Print: 300 Years of Japanese Design will be the first ever publication devoted to examining the kimono as a major source of inspiration, and later vehicle for experimentation, in Japanese print design and culture from the Edo period (1603-1868) to the Meiji period (1868-1912). Print artists, through the wide circulation of prints, have documented the ever-evolving trends in fashion, have popularized certain styles of dress, and have even been known to have designed kimonos. Some famous print designers also were directly involved in the kimono business as designers of kimono pattern books, such as Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1751) and Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764). The dialogue between fashion and print is illustrated here by approximately 70 Japanese prints and illustrated books--by Nishikawa Sukenobu, Suzuki Harunobu, Utagawa Kunisada, Kikukawa Eizan, and Kamisaka Sekka, among others. The group of five essays features new research and scholarship by an international group of leading scholars working today at the intersection of the Japanese print and kimono worlds and the social, cultural, and global significances circulated therein.

Bringing together a wealth of primary sources and with contributions from leading experts, Dress History of Korea presents the most recent approaches to the interpretation of dress and fashion of Korea. Through close analysis of visual, written, and material sources-some newly excavated or recently re-discovered in global museums-the book reveals how dress and adornment evolved from the period of state formation to the modern era. Authors with a range of academic and curatorial experience discuss the close relation of dress and adornments to the socio-political and cultural history of Korea and place the dress history of Korea within broader contexts in studies of fashion, material culture, museology, and costume design. As in other cultures, modern Korean fashion owes many of its styles to historic dress and this process of adaptation is explored within high fashion and popular culture contexts in ways that benefit historians, curators, and designers alike. With key materials newly available to global readers, Dress History of Korea is the indispensable guide to the study of Korean dress and fashion.

During the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain went on holiday in Collioure, a modest French fishing village fifteen miles from the Spanish border. This groundbreaking book examines how two artists, entranced by the shifting light and stunning imagery of the eastern Mediterranean, laid the groundwork for the movement known as Fauvism (from the French fauve, or “wild beast”). Featuring more than 70 paintings, watercolors, and drawings produced by Matisse and Derain during their stay, the book also brings to life their personal and artistic revelations with 21 of their letters, published here for the first time in English. Vivid and engaging texts detail their daring experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective; the scandal their paintings caused when they were exhibited several months later; and how, despite the jeering remarks from critics, these works changed the course of French painting. Emphasizing as never before the legacy of that summer, this publication shows how the two artists’ radical investigations galvanized their contemporaries, and how this strain of modernism, created almost by accident, resonates even into the present day.

This catalogue, published annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announces the Museum's publications for that year. It also features notable backlist titles and provide a complete list of books available in print at the time of publication.

The kimono is an iconic garment with a history as rich and colourful as the textiles from which it is crafted. Deeply associated with Japanese culture both past and present, it has often been thought of as a highly gendered, rigidly traditional and unchanging national costume. This book challenges that perception, revealing the nuanced meanings and messages behind the kimono from the point of view of its wearers and producers, many of whom – both men and women – see the garment as a vehicle for self-expression. Taking a material culture approach, The Social Life of Kimono is the first study to combine the history of the kimono as a fashionable garment with an in-depth exploration of its multifaceted role today on both the street and the catwalk. Through case studies covering historical advertising campaigns, fashion magazines, interviews with contemporary kimono designers, large scale and small craft producers, and consumers who choose to wear them, The Social Life of Kimono gives a unique insight into making and meaning of this complex garment.