TAASA TEXTILE STUDY GROUP, NSW – TAASA Review December 2016

Black Ships and White Cats 13 September 2016 Our guest speaker from Singapore, Fiona Cole, traced the changes in kimono dress beginning with the unwelcome arrival in Japan of the American, Commodore Perry in 1853.

Traditional textile artisans faced competition from imported clothing, with urban men increasingly switching to Western style for work and high class ladies adopting the latest fashions from abroad.

Efforts were made to counteract this decline by using new textile technologies and processes such as dyes, jacquard looms and wool fibre. In the Meiji period, people began to add Western elements to otherwise traditional outfits, for example, women using the male hakama with a blouse or a male haori jacket over a kimono...