In Japan, craft is a form of devotion — whether weaving a gold obi in Kyoto for an emperor’s court, or mending a work coat with a hundred small stitches because silk was forbidden to you.
✨ Fun fact: The Japanese art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery with lacquer and gold, treating the crack not as damage to hide but as part of the object’s history to honour.
Of all the world’s textile cultures, Japan’s feels like a cousin to ours — a place where silk woven with gold is treated with the same reverence we give a Banarasi.
The court that dressed in colour
It begins at the imperial court in Kyoto. In the Heian period (794–1185), a noblewoman wore the jūnihitoe — the “twelve-layer robe,” a set of unlined silk gowns worn one over another. The artistry was not in the cut but in the colour: only a sliver of each layer showed at the collar and the cuff, and the sequence of those slivers had to be exactly right for the season. Kasane no irome, they called it — layered colour. Plum for early spring, willow, wisteria, autumn maple.
We know how seriously they took it because the court’s great writers could not stop talking about it. Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji around the year 1000, and Sei Shōnagon in The Pillow Book, both describe robes and their colour combinations with forensic attention. A woman could be judged, admired or quietly mocked on the strength of her layering alone. A thousand years ago, in a palace in Kyoto, cloth was character.
Nishijin — the brocade of Kyoto
Japan’s great brocade is Nishijin-ori. Its name is a scar: during the Ōnin War (1467–1477) Kyoto burned and its weavers scattered, and when they came home they settled on the ground that had been the western camp — nishi jin — of one of the armies. From that ruined field grew the workshops that clothed the emperor’s court, the shogun’s household and the great temples.
Using silk and gold thread on intricate looms, Nishijin’s weavers create the sumptuous obi — the wide sash of the kimono — in patterns of cranes, pines and flowers, and the magnificent robes of the Noh stage, the ceremonial theatre of the shogun’s court. It is, in every sense, Japan’s kamkhwab.
One footnote we love: in the 1870s, Nishijin sent its weavers all the way to Lyon and brought home the Jacquard loom. The silk city that dressed Versailles and the silk district that dressed Kyoto had found each other — a story we tell in France & the Fashion Houses.
The dyer’s arts — yuzen and shibori
Where the kimono is not woven into pattern, it is dyed into it. Yūzen is the art of painting fine, pictorial designs onto silk by hand, using rice-paste resist to hold each colour in its place. It carries the name of Miyazaki Yūzen, a fan-painter working in Kyoto around 1700, whose designs were so admired that women wanted them on their robes.
And there is a reason the technique flourished. The Tokugawa shoguns issued sumptuary edict after sumptuary edict, forbidding merchants — however rich — from wearing gold thread, heavy embroidery, certain silks. So the dyers simply found another road to splendour: if you may not weave gold into the cloth, paint a garden onto it instead. Restriction, as so often, produced an art form.
The greatest names in Japanese painting are tangled up in this. Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), whose irises and plum blossoms are national treasures, was born into the Kariganeya — a Kyoto kimono house that dressed the aristocracy. He grew up among bolts of silk, designed robes himself, and the “Kōrin style” became a pattern language that dyers and weavers are still borrowing from today.
Shibori — Japan’s exquisite tie-dye — binds, folds and stitches the cloth before dyeing, often in deep indigo.
Shibori is Indian too — and we weave with it
Here is where Japan reaches straight back to us. Shibori is not Japan’s alone; it is the local name for something India has practised for at least as long. We simply call it bandhani.
The method is the same argument in two languages: bind the cloth so tightly in places that the dye cannot reach, then dye it, then untie it — and the pattern surfaces where the thread held. In Japan the binding is stitched and folded into waves and clamps; in Gujarat and Rajasthan a bandhej artist ties thousands of minuscule points by hand, each fingernail-pinched knot becoming one tiny dot in the finished field. The English phrase “tie-dye” and the Sanskrit root bandh, “to tie,” are describing one idea that appeared, independently, at both ends of Asia. Read it in full in Bandhani: the tie-and-dye art of a thousand knots — and see its cousin, the diagonal-wave leheriya of Rajasthan.
And it is not a distant relative for us — it is on our own looms. At Khinkhwab we love pairing the two great resist-and-weave traditions in one drape: a handwoven Banarasi ground carrying real zari, brought together with bandhani’s tied-and-dyed dots, so that the loom and the dye-vat share a single saree. It is exactly the marriage this whole post keeps circling — pattern that is woven meeting pattern that is resisted — and you can see how India folds it into weaving across our map of Indian embroidery and atlas of Indian saris.
The artists who recorded the kimono
If you want to know what the Japanese actually wore, look at the prints. The ukiyo-e artists of Edo drew the fashionable women of their day in exhaustive detail — and none more lovingly than Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806), whose portraits of beauties record every stripe, every scattered crest, every trailing hem. They were the fashion plates of their age, and they are now our best evidence of it.
And the tradition is not finished. Itchiku Kubota (1917–2003) spent decades chasing tsujigahana, a dazzling dyeing technique lost since the sixteenth century, reinvented it in his own way, and then made kimono that hang together as single enormous landscapes — mountains, oceans, autumn — across dozens of robes. Proof, if we needed it, that a traditional cloth can still be a living art.
The stitch that mends
Now turn the picture over. If the court wore layered silk and the merchants were forbidden gold, the farmers of the cold north were forbidden silk altogether. They dressed in hemp and cotton, dyed indigo — and they made that restriction beautiful too.
Sashiko — running-stitch embroidery in white thread on indigo cloth — reinforced and repaired work clothes until the mending itself became the pattern. Rags were layered and re-patched into boro. Worn-out cloth was torn into strips and woven anew as sakiori. Nothing was wasted; everything was made to last.
Kintsugi — the golden join
Which brings us to the most beautiful repair of all. The story usually told is this: in the fifteenth century the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa cracked a favourite Chinese tea bowl and sent it back to China to be mended. It came home clamped together with heavy metal staples — the Japanese took one look and nicknamed the bowl Bakōhan, “the locust clamps.” Surely, they thought, we can do better than this.
What they made instead was kintsugi — “golden joinery.” The broken pieces are glued back together with urushi, the natural lacquer tapped from the sap of the lacquer tree, and while the seam is still tacky it is dusted with powdered gold. The crack is not hidden. It is drawn in gold. It becomes the most beautiful line on the bowl — the repair is the decoration.
There is even a technique for when a fragment has been lost for good: yobitsugi, “called-in joinery,” where the gap is filled with a shard of a completely different pot. One bowl becomes a patchwork of several lives, every seam between them written in gold.
The idea belongs to the world of the tea ceremony, and to wabi-sabi — the beauty of the imperfect, the worn, the impermanent. The great tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) taught that a humble, used, visibly mended bowl could be worth more than a flawless one, precisely because it had lived. A pot with a gold seam has a biography.
Now look back at the sashiko coat, and you will see it is the same thought in cloth. A stitch in white thread; a seam in gold. Neither one apologises. Both say exactly the same thing: this was broken, and it was loved enough to keep.
We think about that whenever someone asks us whether a saree is “ruined.” A Banarasi is not spoiled by a life — it is made by one. Zari can be restored, a fall re-stitched, a tired saree cut down and reborn as something else entirely. The gold was never there to hide the years. It is there to honour them.
The thread we love
A court that read a woman’s taste in the edge of her sleeve. A painter’s family who sold kimono. A law that banned gold and accidentally invented an art. A way of tying cloth against the dye that surfaced at both ends of Asia and became shibori in Kyoto and bandhani in Kutch. The weavers of Nishijin and the weavers of Banaras have never met, yet they share a faith: that silk and gold, worked by hand, are worth a lifetime’s skill — and that cloth, cared for and mended, is meant to outlive us. See it in our Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is Nishijin brocade?
Nishijin-ori is the traditional silk brocade of Kyoto, woven with gold and coloured silk into obi sashes, kimono fabric and Noh robes. The district takes its name from the site of the “western camp” of the Ōnin War, where the weavers resettled after the fighting.
What is a jūnihitoe?
The “twelve-layer robe” of the Heian imperial court — many unlined silk gowns worn one over another, judged not on their cut but on the seasonal colour combinations glimpsed at the collar and sleeve.
Who was Miyazaki Yūzen?
A Kyoto fan-painter of around 1700 whose name attached itself to yūzen — the art of painting pictorial designs onto silk with rice-paste resist, which flourished partly because Tokugawa sumptuary laws forbade merchants to wear gold thread and embroidery.
Is shibori the same as Indian bandhani?
They are the same family of resist tie-dyeing, arrived at independently. Both bind the cloth so the dye cannot reach certain spots, then dye and untie it to reveal the pattern. Japan’s shibori tends to be stitched, folded and clamped; India’s bandhani (or bandhej) is tied into thousands of tiny hand-pinched knots, and Rajasthan’s leheriya rolls the cloth to dye diagonal waves. The Sanskrit bandh, “to tie,” is the root of both bandhani and the English “tie-dye.”
Why is so much old Japanese clothing indigo cotton?
Because silk was largely reserved for the upper classes. Ordinary people wore hemp and cotton dyed with indigo — and turned patching and mending (sashiko, boro, sakiori) into an art of its own.
What is kintsugi, and how is it done?
Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery so that the repair is celebrated rather than concealed. The pieces are rejoined with urushi, a natural tree lacquer, and the seams are then dusted with powdered gold — so the crack ends up as a shining line of gold across the object.
What is yobitsugi?
A form of kintsugi used when a fragment is missing altogether: the gap is filled with a shard from a completely different vessel, and the joins are drawn in gold — so a single bowl becomes a patchwork of several histories.
Why do the Japanese repair pottery with gold?
Because of a belief, rooted in the tea ceremony and in wabi-sabi, that an object’s history is part of its beauty. A bowl that has broken and been mended has lived, and the gold marks that life rather than hiding it.
Sources & further reading
On Nishijin brocade, Heian court dress, yūzen and shibori, and the sashiko-and-boro tradition of mending, see the open-access collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing. On kintsugi, urushi lacquer and the tea-ceremony aesthetic of wabi-sabi, see the Japanese ceramics collections of the Tokyo National Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
