Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, Sharaku, Gray
Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, Sharaku, Gray
Musubi
Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) built his reputation on ōkubi-e - close-cropped portraits of women, cut off at the shoulders, that read almost like film stills. This one shows a young woman mid-breath, blowing into a poppin, a thin glass toy that pops when air moves through it, her kimono a checkerboard of red. Utamaro caught the instant just before the sound.
Musubi prints the composition on cotton furoshiki, in gray, at 48cm for a lunch box or a book.
Made in Japan by Musubi.
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About the maker
Furoshiki is older than any explanation for why it still exists. The Shosoin Treasure House in Nara has kept furoshiki in storage since it opened in 756 - cloth used to wrap and carry, unchanged in purpose for nearly thirteen centuries. In 1937, when Kyoto's Yamada Kanshichi Store first opened, furoshiki was still ordinary. Students carried their textbooks in it. People carried whatever else wouldn't fit in a bag.
The store became Yamada Sen-i, and the Yamada family has run it since: Koichi Yamada from 1966, his son Yoshio from 2003. In between, furoshiki stopped being ordinary - zippers and suitcases made it optional in a way it had never been. Musubi's response was not to freeze the cloth as heritage but to keep asking what else it could do: reversible dyeing that gives one square two patterns, water-repellent weaves, collaborations with the textile house minä perhonen, the artist Masaru Suzuki, the illustrator Adeline Klam. The techniques changed. The cloth did not.
Recent work is in organic cotton and recycled polyester as well as the old weaves. Furoshiki from the Kyoto workshop has been shown at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and installed in front of Paris City Hall - a piece of cloth for wrapping things, still travelling.
