I truly fell in love with kimono in 2016. Since then, they have become an essential part of both my everyday life and my work.
Of course, I am deeply drawn to their beauty.
But that is not the only reason kimono continue to fascinate me.
What fascinates me just as much is how a kimono — and the cloth itself — can continue to be used over time. It can be repaired and resewn, passed on to someone else, and sometimes transformed into something completely different.
When I founded AKIZAKURA in 2017, one of my first projects was creating parasols from old kimono. The idea came from learning how people in earlier Japan found ways to keep kimono and their fabric in use, even after they could no longer serve their original purpose.
It made me wonder:
Could this wisdom from the past be given a new form that fits the way we live today?
That idea became the starting point for AKIZAKURA’s kimono upcycling parasols, and it is also why these different forms of “Re” — Repair, Reuse, Resale, and Remake — have continued to interest me.
In this two-part series, I would like to look at both the past and the present.
Part 1 looks back at how kimono and cloth were repaired, bought and sold, resewn, and reused in earlier Japan — sometimes ending up in forms you might never imagine from the original garment.
Part 2 turns to the present, exploring how old kimono are being reused and upcycled today into clothing, bags, art, accessories, and more.
In This Article
- Cloth Was Worth Keeping
- More Than Economic Value
- First, Keep It as Clothing
- From One Wearer to Another
- Even the Pieces Had a Market
- Not Every Kimono Followed the Same Path
- Sashiko and Sakiori — When Necessity Became Craft
- When Cloth Became Material Again
- When Clothing Became Easier to Replace
- Was This Sustainable Fashion?
Cloth Was Worth Keeping
Today, much of textile production is industrialized, and clothing can be produced on an enormous scale. For many of us, buying a new garment is not a major decision.
Before industrial textile production, the situation was very different.
A piece of cloth already represented a great deal of work before it ever became a kimono.
For silk, it began with raising silkworms and producing cocoons. The silk had to be reeled into thread, prepared, woven, and — depending on the textile — dyed or decorated before it could finally become a garment.
After I became fascinated by kimono, I spent several years raising silkworms with my parents. It gave me a firsthand sense of how much care and work were involved even before silk became thread.
Cotton began in the field too. It had to be grown, processed, spun into thread, woven into cloth, and finished before anyone could wear it.
So when a kimono became worn, no longer fitted its owner, or was no longer needed, the cloth itself had not suddenly lost its value.
It still represented material, skill, labor, and time.
Perhaps it is easier to understand, then, why people found so many ways to keep it in use.
And those ways went much further than simply repairing a torn sleeve.
More Than Economic Value
The practical value of cloth helps explain why it was repaired and reused for so long.
But I do not think practicality tells the whole story.
In Japan, people have also long lived with ways of thinking that gave meaning to their relationship with the things around them.
In religious traditions, mountains, trees, rocks, waterfalls, and other parts of nature could be associated with kami, or understood as places where kami might appear or reside.
Alongside this, there are also stories and customs that show how everyday objects could come to be treated as more than simply useful things.
One fascinating example is tsukumogami — old stories in which tools and household objects, after many years of use, take on a spirit or presence of their own.
There are also customs such as hari kuyō, in which old and broken needles are given a memorial service. Similar ceremonies have been held for dolls, brushes, and other objects that have served people over time.
None of this means that people repaired kimono because they believed every piece of cloth contained a god.
The reasons for reuse were often very practical.
But practicality and feeling do not have to be separate.
When something has been used, repaired, cared for, and passed from one person to another over many years, it can begin to carry more than its material value.
This is one of the things that interests me most about the history of kimono reuse.
It was not only about making cloth last.
It also invites us to think about the relationship people formed with the things they continued to use.
First, Keep It as Clothing
Before an old kimono became something else, there was another possibility to consider first:
Could it still remain a kimono?
One reason this was possible lies in the way kimono are made.
Unlike clothing shaped closely around the body, a kimono is constructed mainly from long, rectangular pieces of fabric. Much of the original cloth remains intact within the garment.
And because it was traditionally sewn by hand, those seams could be opened again.
This made possible one of the most fascinating practices in kimono care: arai-hari.
Instead of washing the kimono as a complete garment, it could be carefully unstitched. The separate pieces of fabric were washed and finished, then sewn back together again.
Arai-hari was already practiced in the Edo period (1603–1868), and specialists existed to carry out this work.
For a little while, the kimono stopped being a kimono at all.
It returned to pieces of cloth.
And then those pieces could become clothing again.
They might be sewn back into the same kimono, adjusted to a different size, or rearranged so that worn areas were less noticeable.
This is one of the things I find so fascinating about kimono construction.
Taking a kimono apart did not necessarily mean destroying it.
Sometimes, it was simply part of the process of allowing it to continue.
From One Wearer to Another
A kimono did not always stay within one family.
It could also move into someone else’s life.
By the Edo period, secondhand clothing had become a real business. Old garments were bought and sold, repaired, taken apart, transported, and sold again through networks of merchants and craftspeople.
And this was not a small trade.
One record from 1774 lists 3,951 people in Edo working in different parts of the secondhand-clothing business.
That number gives us a glimpse of just how active the market had become.
A kimono worn by one person could be sold, repaired if necessary, and worn again by someone the original owner would never meet.
Some used clothing even travelled long distances. Garments and cloth collected around cities such as Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka were carried to other parts of Japan, including northern regions where used cotton was especially valued.
So when a kimono left its first owner, its story did not necessarily end there.
It could simply be moving on to the next person.
Even the Pieces Had a Market
What happened when a kimono was too worn or damaged to be sold as a kimono?
Even then, the cloth could still have value.
Records from early in the Meiji period (1868–1912) show that people traded not only complete secondhand garments, but also kimono that had already been taken apart into flat pieces.
There were pieces large enough to reuse, smaller pieces for patching, old cotton, and even worn fabric intended for sakiori weaving.
In other words, the market did not end with the garment.
A kimono could lose its value as clothing and still remain valuable as material.
A large piece might be used again as cloth.
A smaller one might repair something else.
And fabric that was no longer suitable for either could still find another purpose.
The pieces became smaller.
But that did not necessarily mean they had become useless.
Not Every Kimono Followed the Same Path
Of course, not every kimono followed the same journey.
What happened next depended on many things — especially the material, its condition, and its value.
Silk, cotton, and hemp were not treated in exactly the same way.
A fine silk kimono might be carefully repaired, preserved, passed on, or reused in another form. Some valuable silk textiles even found new lives in Buddhist temples, where old kimono fabric was transformed into kesa, the robes worn by Buddhist monks, or used for other temple textiles.
Worn cotton, especially everyday and work textiles, could follow a particularly practical path.
Worn cotton could be patched, turned into work clothing, used for footwear or bags, or eventually become material for sakiori weaving.
So there was no single “life cycle” for an old kimono.
One garment might remain clothing for generations.
Another might become something completely different.
What happened next depended on what the cloth still had to offer.
Sashiko and Sakiori — When Necessity Became Craft
Some of the Japanese textile techniques we admire today were also practical ways of keeping cloth in use for longer.
Sashiko could strengthen worn fabric, hold layers together, add warmth, and help clothing last longer.
Sakiori took reuse even further. Old cloth — especially cotton — was torn into narrow strips and woven into a new textile.
So cloth that had already been worn could become cloth again.
Today, we may first notice the beauty of sashiko, boro, patchwork, or sakiori.
But behind that beauty was also a practical question:
How can this cloth still be used?
Practical needs like this helped shape techniques that later generations came to admire for their beauty as well.
When Cloth Became Material Again
Eventually, some textiles became too worn to be repaired or reused as cloth.
But even then, they were not always discarded.
From the Meiji period into the Taishō period (1912–1926), worn-out textiles were being collected as raw material for products such as paper, stuffing, reclaimed fiber, and industrial wiping cloths.
At this stage, reuse no longer meant preserving the kimono itself — or even keeping the cloth in a recognizable form.
The remaining material could simply be used for something else.
This shows just how far textile reuse could go: from wearing and resewing a garment, to reusing smaller pieces, and finally to recovering the material itself.
When Clothing Became Easier to Replace
For generations, repairing and reusing cloth made practical sense.
But little by little, that balance began to change.
From the Meiji period onward, industrial production expanded, Western-style clothing spread, and ready-made garments gradually became more widely available.
After the Second World War, mass production accelerated the change even further.
This did not mean that people suddenly stopped repairing or reusing clothing. Secondhand garments continued to be bought and sold, and old textiles remained part of recycling industries well into the Shōwa period (1926–1989).
What changed was how necessary this kind of reuse was in everyday life.
As new clothing became easier and less expensive to obtain, taking an old garment apart, washing the cloth, sewing it again, or finding another use for every piece was no longer as necessary in everyday life.
The kimono itself had not suddenly changed.
What changed was the world around it.
Was This Sustainable Fashion?
Looking back today, many of these practices feel surprisingly familiar.
Repairing clothes. Buying and selling secondhand garments. Reusing fabric. Remaking what could no longer be worn.
Today, we might connect all of these with ideas such as sustainable or circular fashion.
But people in the Edo or Meiji periods were not necessarily doing these things for the environmental reasons we think of today.
Cloth took time, skill, labor, and money to produce. Repairing what already existed, buying something secondhand, or finding another use for worn fabric simply made practical sense.
At the same time, practicality was not necessarily the whole story. The long-used word mottainai — expressing regret when something of value is wasted — also reminds us that waste could carry more than a practical cost.
So I do not think we need to call this “sustainable fashion” in the modern sense.
What interests me more is that many of the practices we now associate with sustainability were already part of everyday textile life in Japan.
The words may be modern.
The practices are not.
And perhaps that is what this history can still offer us today.
Not a model of the past that we need to recreate, but a reason to look again at the skills, systems, and ways of thinking that already existed.
That is one of the reasons kimono continue to fascinate me.
Their beauty is only part of the story.
In Part 2, we will turn to the present and look at how old kimono are being reused and upcycled today.
Sources
- Tamada, Maki. “On the Culture of Textile Recycling in Japan.” Journal of the Textile Machinery Society of Japan, Vol. 61, No. 3, 2008, pp. 189–194. J-STAGE
- Tamada, Maki. “The Transition of Textile Recycling in Japan: The Establishment of Early-Modern Used-Clothing Wholesalers and Uses of Recovered Textiles.” Journal of the Textile Machinery Society of Japan, Vol. 63, No. 10, 2010, pp. 559–562. J-STAGE
- The Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts, FUREAIKAN. “A Whole Kimono from Just a Roll of Fabric.” Google Arts & Culture
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Sashiko Jacket.” Japan, second half of the 19th century. The Met
- Aomori Prefectural Government. “Nambu Sakiori.” Aomori Prefecture
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “One-Legged Umbrella Monster (Kasa ippon ashi).” 1857. The Met
- Sensō-ji Temple. “Hari Kuyō-e (Needle Memorial Service).” Sensō-ji
- Chiso Gallery. “Kosode Transformed.” 2026. Chiso
- Web Japan. “Mottainai.” Trends in Japan, September 28, 2005. Web Japan
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