My Next Book Project

Fashion research has mostly been about the fashion industry, or about famous designers. Recently however, there is a new strand of research called “Wardrobe Studies”. This studies the other side of the equation. What happens to the clothes that are bought from the designers or the industry? How do we buy them? What helps us make our choices? Do we buy new or used, or do we get hand me downs or second-hand items? How do we store our clothes? How do we keep them? Which ones are precious to us? When do we use them? And finally, how do we throw them away? This area of study is important for the fashion and textile industry to know, to produce the goods that people want.

I noticed that some people who love kimono say that they worry about what will happen to their kimono after they die. Some people have even asked me to come and look at their collections that they don’t know how to sell. What it is about kimono that means that we cannot just throw it away? There is something in kimono that is different from regular fashion. Of course, I think that kimono is a wonderful fashion system, but no one keeps their kimono mixed up with their other clothes. Kimono requires its own space. There is something more, a plus alpha in kimono, that I wanted to explore.

So, between the years of 2016 and 2020 I and my assistant and a photographer went exploring the secret places that we don’t make public: the kimono closet. We went into 50 homes and opened 50 closets. We recorded how many kimono they had and what types they were. We asked where they came from and noted how they were stored. Then we asked for the stories about the owner’s most precious kimono. This book will be a fascinating insight into the world of these women’s kimono closets. This is the cultural anthropology of the kimono closet. I hope you will enjoy learning about what is precious to people and their family histories and stories through my next book. The Kimono Closet. “Tansu Biraki”.