Outfit of the Week: Graduation Style!

First of all, sorry for the lapse in posts! My laptop was out for repairs due to a faulty connector cable between the body and the screen, but it’s back now, which means I can resume semi-regular content updates 🙂

For this week, I decided to try my hand at a traditional graduation-style outfit of furisode and hakama. This particular furisode stirs up a lot of conflicting feelings for me. It was one of the first kimono I bought, despite technically being too old to wear it even back then. I also bought it while visiting someone who was very important to me during that phase of my life. We haven’t spoken in years, and the kimono still reminds me of that trip, but I was hoping doing something fun with it would help me distance myself from the awkward memories.*

Wrangling Tsukiko into the hakama proved a lot more difficult than I expected, and she looks a little rumpled, but the outfit still turned out pretty fantastic, I think. Unfortunately, for some reason, the date-eri looked INCREDIBLY NEON PINK in the photos, no matter what I did with lighting and then later in post-processing. I edited the photos to be a little more accurate. They’re still not perfect, but they are a better representation of the ensemble.

Items used in this coordination

*Update if anyone is curious, after some upheaval we’re closer than ever now. Maybe this was cathartic to the universe somehow.

Outfit of the Week: Valentine’s Day!

I may be single, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get caught up in the ridiculous fluffy commercialism of Valentine’s Day, right? There are plenty of folks in my life whom I love. So I decided that for this week, I’d try to come up with a sort of thematic outfit. I started with this black wool komon I got from Ame a while back. The red and white designs, from a distance, remind me of hearts and snowflakes, which seemed perfect for a love-related holiday this time of year. The kimono came with a matching haori, but I decided to bring a bit of brightness to it with my well-worn red haori and a red hakata obi. I think this outfit is definitely cute and lovely, without being overly frilly or twee.

Items used in this coordination

Outfit of the Week: Lily Furi Coordination

After deciding to make this a regular feature, I started planning out all sorts of outfits. Seasonally appropriate outfits, special combinations for holidays, etc. And then this lily furisode arrived and all my plans flew right out the window! I couldn’t wait to do something with it. I had this really lovely warm gold fukuro obi with subtle green and pink accents from the obi bundle eons ago, and it seemed like the perfect complement to the rich green of the kimono. I also happened to have just about the perfect obidome for this kimono, a gold oval with pink lilies on it!

Unfortunately, this also reminded me how long it’s been since I tied anything other than a simple hanhaba or nagoya obi, and I ended up having to improvise a sort of large-scale cho-cho/bunko hybrid musubi. It’s not ideal, but I think it worked out alright.

Items used in this coordination

Lily Furisode

It’s been literally several years since I bought a kimono. I still have ones I haven’t worn, ones that don’t fit, ones that I am too old for. I’d promised myself no more buying kimono.

And then Jess went and put this one up on the market. I have coveted this kimono for as long as she’s had it. I love the rich, dark green colour and the beautiful, delicate lilies. She needed money, I needed this kimono. Clearly, it was meant to be.

It arrived today, and it’s everything I’d been hoping for and more. I can’t wait to dress Tsukiko in it!

The body is a gorgeous rich deep green, intersected with a sort of ribbon-like fluid design and lilies. The hem is navy blue, which I did not realise in the photos!

Quiet afternoon kitsuke time

I know I have not been posting in this blog anywhere near as frequently as I used to, and I apologise. However, yesterday I got an overwhelming urge to coordinate a kimono I’d never worn before, and decided to pair it with an obi I’ve also never worn before.

The kimono is a half-lined synthetic piece with tiny white fans in a sort of gradient pattern. I won it at the Astoria street fair in NYC in the summer of 2012, and it’s been sitting in an armoire ever since. I decided to pair it with a bright red faux-shibori obi I got from Ame years ago, and couldn’t resist using my ubiquitous lemon-yellow shibori obiage and hakata obijime.

Something about the combination of tiny patterns felt a bit retro to me, and I’ve been obsessively reading the Sano Ichiro series of novels by Laura Joh Rowland lately, so I decided to aim for a bit of an Edo-style silhouette, tying my obi much lower than usual and going for a more pigeon-shaped and natural-looking bust. I’m not sure how well it succeeded, but it was very comfortable! To emphasize the period feel, I had on a pair of black geta with pinstriped hanao, but they got cut off in the photos. Haha. Whoops!

Items used in this coordination