How a kimono comes together?

Do you know how kimonos are assembled? 

To start with, there are two types of kimonos worn by women in Japan based on their marital state. Furisode (振袖) are worn typically by unmarried women at special events and a tomesode (留袖) is usually a formal dress for a married women. The difference is that Furisode has long kimono sleeves that almost go to the ground and tomesode has a shorter sleeve. It is said that unmarried women would wave their long sleeves in a different way to show their feelings to the men and that would have been seen as a more graceful way to communicate back then. It was all in a small and subtle gesture, can you imagine?? 

So how are kimonos put together? They are made of rectangular pieces of fabrics, which are about 36cm (14”) in width and total length of about 13m. (16m for furisode) This narrow loomed cloth are called tannmono (反物) and eventually cut into different sized pieces and  and assembled to create a kimono. 

Now that you know a bit about kimonos, you can see that compared to using new fabrics, making things out of kimonos needs a bit of extra work. First, we unpick them to bring back to its original form of cut pieces of tanmono. Having a good seam ripper is super helpful for taking apart a kimono. And we carefully hand wash it, if it’s washable. After the wash, we dry them out of direct sunlight and iron with a low heat setting. And finally it is ready to be upcycled!!!!!