Overview
Taisho is short, urban and disproportionately important. In fifteen years Japanese city life acquired department stores, cafés, cinema and a fashion press, and the clothing that came with them — Western for a visible minority, and a transformed kimono for nearly everyone else.
Key garments and style
The moga and mobo, the modern girl and modern boy, are the era’s image: bobbed hair, cloche hats, dropped-waist dresses and suits, photographed on the Ginza and written about constantly, though they were always a small urban set.
The wider change was in the kimono itself. Meisen — silk woven from threads dyed before weaving, which makes a slightly blurred pattern — was cheap, hard-wearing and machine-produced, and it carried bold Art Nouveau and then Art Deco designs in colours no earlier kimono had used. It was everyday clothing bought ready-made, and it is why Taisho kimono look so unlike Meiji ones.
Schoolgirls wore hakama with laced boots in the haikara style, and from about 1920 the sailor-collar uniform entered girls’ schools, where it has stayed.
The 1923 Kanto earthquake pushed the change along: people who fled in kimono found them dangerous to move in, and Western dress gained ground afterwards.
Transition
Showa carried this modernity into wartime austerity, then into a full switch to Western clothing.