Ancient Asian Fashion Trends: What is Old is New Again Being some reflections on global fashion's influence from East Asian historical garments... Eloquence and Grace:While the new world of the twenty-first century is full of hustle and bustle, technology and the quest for the "cutting edge", it sometimes lacks the kind of simple elegance, grace, and sophistication that came out of the ancient world. One of the more interesting and succinct fashions of the old world come from East-Asia. Known for flowing, floral patterned fabric, China particularly was responsible for much of the early fashion industry, thanks to their production...

Our customer Heather with her husband Rich at a wedding in Westerly, RI  About these pictures: For years now, whenever we do shows, whether it's a quilt show, a Japanese cherry blossom festival or an Anime event, we often have customers tell us that they'll send us a picture when they make something from the fabrics they just bought from us. The above are from one of those situations. Heather bought the shown fabrics from our by-piece rack at a quilt show in Connecticut last year. So imagine our pleasant surprise when these pictures arrived in our email. So, we are...

We've been following the images of this group, Japan Inside (actually http://japaninsides.com ) as they have some excellent and different posts of all sorts of Japanese cultural scenes -- old traditional and new -- on Facebook and elsewhere:  which is where we found this handy chart for our kitsuke fans (kimono-wearers):  For more detailed experts' definition of terms, and read about all things Kimono and Geisha, check out Immortal Geisha (Once on our FAQ page about Immortal Geisha HERE, just scroll down a page to see their Forum, Wiki and Facebook links).

Above Source: David Klapp, Photolibrary (japanese.about.com) 5253 Here at YokoDana Kimono we often are tasked with coming up with English color labels for the seemingly infinite array of colors in Japanese kimonos and fabrics which we post on our site. This is especially challenging when it comes to the many shades of red used In traditional Japanese arts. Perhaps the most famous red is shuiro, translated as vermillion. Shuiro is seen on the Torii gates leading to shrines in Japan (above, top picture), and also in various types of kimonos, often as fringe or border, as well as in higher-end nagajuban...

We posted about this a few months ago in our blog HERE. Today we came across this photo response to it by Tangerine Mountain, a company selling vintage kimonos at Anime conventions and wanted to share it: They had this to say explaining the pictures:  A Photo Response to Protests Against the M.F.A. Boston Kimono Exhibit  At Tangerine Mountain, we are proud to serve ALL customers, regardless of ethnicity or race, ability or disability, religion or creed, sexual identity or orientation.  We believe wholeheartedly that kimono are for everyone.  So do a lot of Japanese folks.  When Claude Monet’s “La Japonaise”...