Muromachi kosode, part 3
The kosode is just about done! It only needs a patch in the lining where I cut the lining too short when sewing the eri down. I’ve been wearing it as a bathrobe, and it’s soooo comfy.
I ended up making a couple of adjustments to improve its wearability. The original sleeves were just under 18″, which was an extravagantly long hanging sleeve in the late 16th century. They were heavy, they got in the way, they knocked things over. I spent too much time pulling them out of the way. In the end I reduced them to about 12″. At that length they were shorter than the vent in the side of the kimono, which looked silly, so I ended up sewing the inner edges to the body of the kimono. The result looked just like the sleeves of married women in late 16th/early 17th-century drawnings. (I’ll hunt up some images.)
The other adjustment was the length. It should be considerably longer than floor-length so it can puddle elegantly, but with two layers of batik cotton (with the sizing still in, since foolishly I didn’t wash it first) there was no elegant puddling. There was just the dignified “standing in a pile of laundry” effect. Clearly it wasn’t going to become part of my regular garb. I committed to making it into a bathrobe, and shortened it so that it was just shy of floor-length when it was unbelted. That brings it to roughly mid-calf when belted. To finish the bottom, the period method is to make the lining and the outer shell the same length, but I liked the look of the dark band against the red of the lining, so I turned up the outer shell and made a deep hem.
The final result is substantially more modest than a modern kimono. The front overlap covers the entire front of the body, so it’s almost impossible to make the front skirts pull open. The tighter it’s wrapped, the harder it is to walk in, but just a little looseness in the wrap makes it about as easy to walk in as a bathrobe. The fact that the obi is a few inches wide, wrapped twice around the body and tied in front with a simple knot, makes the kosode very easy to wear.
It also makes it chunky, an effect you can see in pictures from the period. You don’t wear the kosode to make you look good; you’re basically a mobile rack to show off the decoration of the kosode. Sadly, it makes sense that people would slim the style down. Not only does a slimmer style flatter the wearer more, it’s also harder to wear, more restrictive, and the longer sleeves are heavier and get in the way. Harder to wear = more fashionable, as anyone in ultra-high heels can tell you.
