Japan · Textile / Stage Costume and Headdress
組踊の衣裳・扮装 (Kumiodori no Ishō / Funsō)
Kumiodori (組踊) is the Ryukyu court music-drama created in 1719 for the reception of Chinese investiture envoys. It became a national Important Intangible Cultural Property in 1972 and is on UNESCO's Representative List. Its costumes are a craft ensemble in their own right, and each role has a codified look. The wakashu, a youth serving at court, wears a brilliant bingata long-sleeved robe designed to evoke a young girl's delicacy, with the hair tied high (mā-yui), a hankō-zukin band across the forehead, a tsukuribana (made flower), gold-and-silver mizuhiki cords (basara), red tabi and leggings. Women wear bingata over a red dujin vest and a white kakan skirt, dressed in the tsubo-ori manner: the robe's collar and sleeves are rolled up and tucked into a purple sash. A purple nagasāji band trails from the head, and loosening the sash to let the robe fall signals grief. One lost element has been recovered. In the Ryukyu Kingdom some wakashu robes were made of beni-itajime chirimen, red clamp-resist silk crepe dyed between carved boards and imported from mainland Japan. In Edo the same cloth was a fashionable choice for women's underwear and kimono linings; Ryukyu imported it for the youths' dance costumes and deliberately wore it as the outer robe, to stress the boys' charm. When cheap printed cloth closed the dye works in the Taishō era, no example survived and it became a 'phantom costume'. The dyer Yoshimura Haruko, a descendant of a Gunma dye works, found carved boards in her family's storehouse and revived the technique. With the Takasaki Beni no Kai she supplied crane-patterned beni-itajime crepe for a costume the National Theatre Okinawa restored from 1838 records.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Kumiodori: UNESCO Representative List; national Important Intangible Cultural Property (1972). The costume craft is not separately designated
Noro (ノロ) are the priestesses of Ryukyuan religion, organized into a state hierarchy under King Shō Shin (r.
Okinawan bamboo basketry is the weaving of everyday baskets from hōraichiku (Bambusa multiplex), a clump bamboo with long internodes and low nodes that bends without splitting.
Adan-leaf hats are hats plaited from split, boiled and sun-bleached leaves of adan (Pandanus odoratissimus), the screw pine of Okinawa's shorelines.
Gusuku are the walled strongholds and sacred enclosures of the Ryukyu Islands; an estimated 300–400 dot the archipelago.
Ryukyu Ko-Shishū (琉球古刺繍) is the name given to the embroidery on the few surviving robes of the Ryukyu Kingdom's noro priestesses.
Yaeyama minsā (八重山ミンサー) is a narrow indigo cotton sash, about 10 cm wide, woven on Ishigaki and Taketomi as a warp-rib (warp-faced) cloth with a white hand-bound ikat.
The custom tailoring of the kandura, the white ankle-length robe forming the cornerstone of Emirati men's national dress, worn across the social spectrum from worker to sheikh and directly leveling social status through shared attire.
The hand-carving, in family workshops called morerías, of cedar and other hardwood masks worn in highland Guatemala's syncretic festival dance-dramas — among them the Danza de la Conquista, Baile del Torito, and Baile del Venado — in which…
The hand-weaving and tailoring of the bisht, a rectangular, open-fronted cloak that began as a traveler's garment offering warmth and protection before becoming the most prestigious garment in the Arabian world, a mark of formality and…
The hand-crafting of vejigante masks — horned, fanged, brightly colored festival masks worn during Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza and Carnaval de Ponce — using two genuinely distinct regional techniques: coconut-husk carving (the…
The making of Sardinian traditional costume — one of the most complex and regionally differentiated in Italy, with over 360 distinct local variants — involving weaving, embroidery, sewing, and accessory making in a system where every…
The making of the Chedda, an elaborate bridal ensemble from Tlemcen in northwestern Algeria comprising a handwoven golden-silk gown, an embroidered velvet caftan densely worked in gold thread, a conical chechia headdress wound with the…