Japanese silk robe with a grey-blue ground featuring bundles and flowering branches in red with green and red with blue, stuffed with silk wadding and lined with yellow silk

Japanese silk robe with a grey-blue ground featuring bundles of rice dumplings in bamboo leaves (chimaki) and iris stalks in red with green and red with blue, filled with silk wadding and lined with yellow silk. Model: this jacket is identical to the standard pattern of the Japanese kosode except for the shawl collar, which here is cut as one long strip rather than composed of leftover fabric pieces. The sleeve model appears most divergent at first glance, but here the hanging kimono sleeves are rotated a quarter turn and cut open. In original kosodes, the sleeve pattern always follows that of the body panels, but here, due to the alteration, it stands at a right angle. A kosode is standardly made from a single piece of silk 10.5 m long with a fabric width of approx. 32.0 cm. For this Japanese robe, 10.54 m of fabric was used with a width of 37.0 cm. Decoration: the pattern was applied in a refined form of katagami technique.