It's that time of the year again, Christmas, and if you're looking for an unusual present for a dear one who likes fabrics, textiles and fashion, try something original and unique such as an antique swatch book. A Japanese Shimacho could be a great idea: the word literally means "stripe album", the Shimacho is indeed a sort of reference scrapbook in which weavers would paste small and usually striped cotton swatches.
Fabrics were mainly indigo dyed, so that the colour range went from pale blue to blue-black, with all sorts of shades in between, even though darker nuances prevailed as sumptuary laws in Japan dictated how a person could dress and most people were only allowed to wear dark, somber colours with very little pattern.
So quite often these textile scrapbooks mainly featured bits and pieces of hand-woven cotton in dark shades and at times in patterns such as stripes, checks and kasuri (Japanese ikat).
The Shimacho featured in this post, from Tohoku region, Meiji 26 (1893) is currently available from Tatami Antiques, an independent online marketplace for Japanese antiquities that often offers intriguing textile pieces and ideas for both fashion and interior designers (the item is sold by antique dealer Yamanome).
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