woman's jacket

woman's jacket , mid-late 1800s, Meiji period (1868–1912) or Taisho period (1912–1926)

Where object was made: Japan

Material/technique: hemp; katazome dyeing; cotton; tree-bast fiber

Credit line: Museum purchase: Barbara Benton Wescoe Fund

Accession number: 1993.0010

Not on display

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Exhibition Label:
“Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art,” Nov-2005, Mary Dusenbury
This heavy jacket from northern Japan was designed to be worn over a kimono, indoors and out, in the cold winter months. An older woman probably made the jacket for her own use, weaving, patterning, dyeing and sewing the garment herself, and perhaps also growing the hemp, collecting the wild bast fiber, and producing the thread. The use of hemp for a winter garment suggests a provenance in a region too far north to grow cotton, which is warmer than hemp and other bast fibers. The lining is woven from threads pulled from the inner bark of a tree or vine, probably either linden or wisteria. Although the repetition of the stenciled motifs is well done, the indistinct edges of some of the patterns suggest both that the stencil was worn and that the stenciler did not have access to the quality of resist paste available in commercial workshops.