PROFILE プロフィール

Naomi was born in Akita prefecture and lives in Tokyo now. She belongs to the 55-64 years old age group and is married. She is a manager of a dyeing-weaving studio.
She started to wear kimono 25 years ago when she learnt tea ceremony. She learned to wear kimono in four days at a kimono class. Her tea ceremony teacher was also a teacher of ikebana and sewing, and taught her ikebana and kimono tailoring too, but she was so strict and taught so fast that Naomi couldn’t keep up. She had to study by herself from a tailoring book afterwards, but she tailored her two yukata.
When she was a child, her grandmother tailored and dressed her in a wool ensemble at New Year and a yukata in summer. Her grandmother always wore kimono except in the summer. She did house keeping like cleaning and washing in kimono, so she wore a tsumugi with hanhaba obi with a flat tied style in a relaxed way. Her mother did not wear kimono everyday but she ordered some kimono for Naomi.
Naomi has 30 kimono. As she would like to wear the perfect size kimono, all of her garments are order-made except the two yukata that she tailored. Half of her collection are woven kimono like tsumugi, including Kumejima-tsumugi, Basho-fu, or Kurume-gasuri, etc.
She bought these from a kimono shop which she trusts, and her heart hurts to hear from the shop that the traditional woven kimono are decreasing.