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Japanese wrapping textiles at the Horniman Museum
This exhibition, focussing on textiles and costume, is the culmination of a year-long project to
explore the Horniman Museum’s Japanese collections, during which two curators from Japanese
museums helped to catalogue much of the Museum’s Japanese collection.
The theme is the use of textiles and dress to wrap the body and to wrap gifts, and how
these ‘wrappings’ are used to express ideas about gender, status and respect.
The centrepiece is a wedding couple, the bride wrapped in a multi-layered costume with a
brocaded silk outer robe, or uchikake, and wearing a tsunokakushi, or ‘horn-hider’, the headdress
said to conceal her metaphorical ‘horns’ from her husband until after the wedding. Sections on the
dolls used in the Boys’ Festival and the Girls’ Festival, which indicate the costumes worn by
samurai and courtiers in the past, flank the wedding couple.
Two child’s kimonos, used to wrap a baby on its first presentation to the guardian deity
at a Shinto shrine, reflect different ideas of gender, the boy’s decorated with symbols of
falconry, the girl’s a pink concoction of flowers and temari, toy balls wrapped in silk threads, a
collection of which is also on display.
Garments from various levels of nineteenth century Japanese society reveal rank and
status, from a fisherman’s robe decorated in tsutsugaki technique with motifs to celebrate a successful
catch to a silk townswoman’s kimono first exhibited at the 1910 Anglo-Japanese exhibition
at Shepherd’s Bush.
Boy’s kimono, hawk design.
Image © Heinz Schneebeli