Since the late nineteenth century, Japonisme had spread not only across painting and the decorative arts but also into the fields of textiles and fashion. According to Akiko Fukai(1994), as early as the 1880s the silk-weaving industry of Lyon was already strongly influenced by Japanese dyeing and weaving techniques. Textiles featuring natural motifs such as chrysanthemums and irises were produced and supplied to Parisian haute couture ateliers. A Japanese sensibility toward nature was thus fused with Western decorative styles and embraced as a new form of “exotic elegance.”

In 1890, Charles Frederick Worth created an evening gown made of cashmere twill decorated with Japanese-style cherry blossoms and samurai helmets. In 1894, he presented a dress inspired by the compositional method of the kimono’s eba-moyō (picture-pattern layout), treating the garment as a single pictorial canvas. This two-dimensional approach differed radically from Western dressmaking, which emphasized three-dimensional cutting. Thus, the “influence of the kimono” in the late nineteenth century appeared primarily in surface design rather than garment structure.

By the early twentieth century, the physical form of the kimono itself attracted attention in Europe, partly due to the overseas performances of Japanese actress Sada Yacco. Around the same time, the arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris (1909) sparked a fascination with Orientalism, and the stage costumes of Léon Bakst influenced both decorative arts and fashion. Within this cultural climate, designers such as Paul Poiret, Jeanne Paquin, Mariano Fortuny, and Madeleine Vionnet began incorporating “kimono-like” elements into modern fashion.

Poiret, in particular, liberated women from the constraints of the corset, introducing silhouettes that were loose and fluid. His well-known “Manteau Kimono” had been created even before the arrival of the Ballets Russes, and Poiret denied having been influenced by Bakst. At the legendary costume ball “The Thousand and Second Night” in 1911, he presented his Oriental-inspired fashion, captivating Europe. His evening coat “Le Manteau de Pourpre,” produced in the 1910s, is a representative example. Art and fashion historian Alice Mackrell (1990) describes it as “a reinterpretation of kimono lines and silhouette in Poiret’s own style, with velvet draping softly around the body.” Poiret’s creations were formed not through structured tailoring but through the act of wrapping — a fundamentally kimono-like approach.

Other couturiers also discovered new beauty in the kimono’s form. Worth produced velvet gowns in the 1910s featuring soft drapery. Paquin popularized cocoon-shaped coats with deep, backward-drawn collars reminiscent of the courtesans’ uchikake. Paquin is said to have developed an interest in the linear, flowing forms of Japanese garments after encountering Japanese art as a representative at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Fukai (1994: 204) notes that Western viewers perceived the “looseness” of kimono in ukiyo-e prints as both elegant and erotic, a sensibility likely shared by Poiret and Paquin.

Fortuny used Japanese silk to create gowns with finely pleated textures. His coats decorated with butterflies and hyperbolic motifs reproduced traditional Japanese designs using stencil techniques. The Callot Soeurs, known for their flat, decoration-free dresses, later influenced Vionnet. In the 1920s, Vionnet introduced practical tube-like silhouettes inspired by both the ancient Greek chiton and the kimono’s rectilinear structure. Her innovative bias cut can be understood as a modern reinterpretation of the kimono’s principle of straight-cut fabric.

Taken together, Japonisme in fashion from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century was far more than decorative exoticism. It provided an opportunity for Western fashion to reconsider a fundamental question: how should the body be enveloped by clothing? The kimono, while foreign, functioned as a “mirror” that challenged and restructured the foundations of modern fashion.

References

Fukai, Akiko (1994). Fashion and Japonisme. Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Mackrell, Alice (1990). Poiret. London: Batsford.

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