Blogged because this is the best obi ever. #__# (MANEKI-NEKO!!!!)
Found via an IGF thread, which is where I find a lot of my links. ^^;
Floofy arctic foxies. by ~Nanukk on deviantART
This piece was one of the first things to spark my love of snow foxes. Please view it and love it. X3 I just refound it after searching for it a while… It’s so cute and so fluffy. ^_^” Snow foxes. They are FLOOFY. This image is what added the word FLOOFY to my vocabulary (for better or worse. :/ )
(My art favorites are here, BTW. Mostly kimono and cute animals [you would never guess that, right? ^^; ])
I also really love this one:
Yuki by *C4mi on deviantART
X3 Bought from an American seller for $10.00 USD + shipping. No one else bid, and the item was just labeled as being a kimono obi.
It’s a completely reversible maru obi, and the motifs seem to be Taisho Roman (note the Western playing cards on one side.)
I had been needing a maru obi, but they were all so expensive. @_@ Not knowing what else to do, I prayed for one… Hence my $10.00 obi with only local shipping costs.
And it has botan! X3 Yay!!!
Bit by bit, my plans for Taisho-era geisha henshin are coming together. X3 Fwahahaha…
This is the extravagant costume once worn by Tayuu, which were the highest level of Japanese courtesan in olden times. Unlike geisha, tayuu were prostitutes, although they could refuse customers. While the geisha district was Gion, the Tayuu were based in Shimabara.
Tayuu would wear layer after layer of kimono, a red juban beneath and a thick uchikake on the top. They wore LOTS of hair ornaments (geisha and maiko only wear 2 or 3 at most!) and the best way to tell the difference between Tayuu and other people is that Tayuu *always* tie their obi in the front, which is something NO ONE ELSE does in modern times. They also wear no socks with their geta, and their geta are usually REALLY high like platform shoes.
After WWII, prostitution was outlawed- so although a few Tayuu still exist, they’re just entertainers like geisha now, rather than offering *other* services. The story of tayuu is a tragic one- many of them were forced into that job when young- but now they can follow the form of dancing and costumes of the profession without the sexual aspects.
Note that their outer robe (“uchikake”) is the same type worn as an outermost robe by brides in traditional weddings, and it’s basically the fanciest type of kimono still in use. Uchikake are thick, luxurious, often richly embroidered and have padded hems so that they can trail behind on the ground when being worn. (When tayuu wear an uchikake outside, they often tie it up so that it’s more or less knee-length, since city streets have dirt and stuff.)
(Since this is a very unorthodox summary, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t cite this in a research paper. PLEASE. TT_TT I know way more about kimono than geisha, and way more about geisha than tayuu…)
BTW an “oiran” is almost the same thing as a tayuu, although a bit different.
This Flickr user has tons of galleries of kimono book and obi musubi book scans. The galleries are here.
