Towards the Meiji period, people were trying more to adapt, and at the same time maintain a collective identity. Aware of the changes in society people were trying to reduce the influence of the West by leading a double life 二重生 活 nijyuu seikatsu , with a private Japanese and a public Western part.
Yofuku clothing were mainly worn in public situations where Western-style chairs and desks were present, whereas wafuko clothing was worn in the home, where tatami mats were dominant. Women of those times, even though they had spent their student days in Western-style school uniforms, would revert to Japanese clothes after graduation and marriage.
With new job opportunities, urban woman became an important consumer category. The “good wife, wise mother” ryōsai kenbo could be seen still wearing kimono, but a growing number of modern girls modan gaaru, dressed in the cutting-edge Western clothes. Hats, and cropped hair became the symbol of modern, emancipated women. This trend was accelerated by the Kanto earthquake 1923, after many woman died in a fire, as the kimonos were to inconvenient to use the emergency exits. When a modern city with buildings in Western-style architecture rose from the ruins of disaster, Tokyo’s department stores were rebuilt and expanded in size. At the same time, cheap, informal and ready-to-wear meisen kimono, machine-spun and woven from floss silk mawata and usually dyed using the ikat kasuri technique, became highly popular.
Companies such as Shiseido became trendsetters, promoting new ideals of beauty based on Western standards. Despite the modern kimono was officially promoted as a national dress, female writers, called on Japanese women to adopt a Western way of dressing in order to liberate their body movements from the restrictive and non-movement kimono. But let not forget, when mogagirls walked the sunny streets of Ginza in Tokyo, factory girls in Gunma and Nagano worked ten-hour shifts reeling silk in humid windowless factory rooms for the good of the nation.
01 Artwork: 1903 – Shinpan Hikifuda Mihoncho. Girl in a Kimono riding a bicycle. Hikifuda were a kind of a promotional leaflet distributed from the late Edo to the Taisho era.
02 Artwork: 1930 advertising by Shiseido. The Shiseido cosmetics company opened its Western-style pharmaceutical business in Tokyo in 1872. In the 1920s, the company’s advertising aesthetic became part of an emerging global culture of beauty and youth that was elegant, cosmopolitan and transnational.
03 Artwork: 1930 – Schoolgirls in uniform at tea-time in a very Western styled home.
04 Artwork: 1929 – Advertising by Matsuzakaya about Uniforms & professional clothing for middle-class office workers
05 Artist: Kageyama Kōyō (1907-1981) Artwork: 1928 – photography of modern girls in Ginza
06 Artwork: Nippon-Graph 1929. Kimono Fantasia Summer costume
07 Artist: Fumie Taniguchi (1910-2001) Artwork: 1934 – Walking on the pedestrian street