Overview
Showa is long enough to contain opposites: a state that specified what its citizens should wear, and a generation of designers who upended Paris. Between them sits the decisive change in Japanese dress — the point at which Western clothing became simply what people wore, and the kimono became an occasion.
Key garments and style
The war years brought regulation. A standardised national uniform for men was designated in 1940, and women were pressed into monpe, baggy work trousers, with kimono cut up and remade into them — which destroyed a great deal of prewar cloth.
After 1945 ready-made Western clothing took over quickly, helped by an American-influenced popular culture and by a domestic garment industry that could supply it.
The startling development came later. Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake established themselves in Paris in the 1970s, and in 1981 Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons showed collections there that were black, asymmetric, loosely draped and deliberately unfinished-looking. The reaction was hostile and then decisive: the idea that clothing might not be built to flatter the body entered mainstream fashion and stayed.
At home the DC brand boom put designer labels into ordinary wardrobes through the 1980s.
Transition
The kimono narrowed to coming-of-age, weddings and funerals, and Heisei turned Tokyo’s streets into a fashion force in their own right.