Polish Threads, Japanese Forms: Joanna Hawrot & the Art of the Kimono

joanna_hawrot_22wereable_art_-_unseen_threads_26a.jpg, default, Joanna Hawrot, 'Wearable Art - Unseen Threads', Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Osaka, 31 May - 24 June, photo: Zuza Krajewska

#fashion

In Joanna Hawrot’s Japan-inspired collection, fabric becomes a narrative of the enslavement of the soul and body. In today’s world, femininity is shaped not by clothing and accessories, but by the journey of self-awareness and the pursuit of autonomy.

When an artist draws on a foreign culture, there is always a suspicion as to whether they have correctly interpreted its cultural codes. Despite many years of artistic work that semantically revolves around the kimono and its associated aesthetics, Joanna Hawrot has also experienced this timidity. However, foreignness and distance can be helpful in noticing things that are difficult to see up close. As part of Expo 2025 in Osaka, Joanna presented her project ‘Wearable Art – Unseen Threads’. The team at the prestigious Daimaru Shinsaibashi department store, where she was a guest artist, asked her a question that changed the face of the project: You took kimonos from us. What will you give us in return?

No Culture Is a Lonely Island

Japan has a centuries-long history of isolation from the outside world. After opening up to Western influences during the Meiji period (1868–1912), it became imbued with layers of different cultures (and this process is still ongoing, because according to Wolfgang Welsch, the network of transcultural references will never reach its final form). In the 20th century, clothing styles, the traditional family model and the position of women in society changed significantly. Japan transitioned from fascination to reinterpretation and assimilation of cultural phenomena that were new to it. Alex Kerr writes about this in his book Lost Japan (Penguin Books, 2015), comparing the country to an oyster. If a foreign object, even a grain of sand, gets inside it, the oyster covers its surface with layers of mother-of-pearl until it is completely absorbed, giving birth to a pearl. ‘In like manner, Japan coats all culture from abroad, transforming it into a Japanese-style pearl.’

The essence of the original is lost. An example of this is the Japanese fascination with American culture and fashion, the phenomenon known as ‘ametora’. W. David Marx devoted a separate publication to this phenomenon, noting that what we now call the indigenous American style was largely produced in Japan. His book Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (Basic Books, 2015) shows that the Japanese, fascinated by the trapper style, managed to improve it and multiply it to a level where they do it better than the Americans, who today produce their clothing mainly in China. Breaking jeans down to their basic elements, examining their cut and seams, and getting to the essence of what they are has made it possible to produce luxury Japanese denim from the highest quality cotton. The result is a fabric that is durable in a way that is hard to find in American clothing stores.

Joanna Hawrot, 'Wearable Art - Unseen Threads', Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Osaka, 31 May - 24 June, photo: Zuza Krajewska

Denim is also featured in Joanna Hawrot’s design, who responded enthusiastically to the intrigue of her partners at Daimaru. This allowed her concept to expand to include a fashion aspect in the European part of the project. The artist places the same patterns on fabric sourced from Diesel factories in a different context. Jackets, trousers, bodysuits, leggings and bikinis are presented on a group of voguing dancers who freely interpret the outfits in motion. This ease of movement, the ability to define and express oneself through the fluidity of the flowing body, contrasts with the more static Japanese part. Bożna Wydrowska, choreographer, dancer and performer, one of the co-authors of the project Bal u Bożeny (Ball at Bożena’s), a series of performative events taking place in Warsaw since 2016, which marked the beginning of the ballroom phenomenon in Poland, helped with the casting on the Polish side.

Apart from Bożna (a non-binary person), the rest of the cast are transgender people who interpreted the costumes as an opportunity to create a spontaneous dance routine during the session, symbolically expressing the strength that grows within a group, in their shared presence. Marching together – echoing the slogan from the time of the Black Protests: ‘You will never walk alone’ (which took place throughout Poland from 2016 in protest against the tightening of the anti-abortion law and the restriction of women’s rights).

‘Wearable Art - Unseen Threads’ - Joanna Hawrot in Osaka - photo report [IMAGE GALLERY]

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Kawaii Not So Cute

Work on the exhibition began three years ago and initially focused on a project intended to combine elements of Japanese culture sneaked into European fashion. Over time, the concept developed so much that it became part of Poland’s representation at Expo 2025 in Osaka. For Hawrot, fabric is always the starting point in the design process and the main thread of every project. The designer usually works within the same forms (her collections are based on reinterpretations of traditional Japanese kimonos, haori and hakama), but they are not the ones that carry the weight of the story.

For each collection, Hawrot invites a different artist to collaborate, whose sensitivity and leitmotifs are transformed into digitally printed patterns previously drawn by Joanna. She herself becomes a kind of mother planet, orbited by artists regularly involved in subsequent projects. Among them are Maurycy Gomulicki, Angelika Markul, Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk, Sonia Hensler, jewellery designer Tomasz Wichrowski and photographer Zuza Krajewska, who are also involved in this project. The artist has formed a collective around herself, which operates with similar ideas and means of expression.

This time, however, Hawrot filters everything exclusively through her own sensibility. Japanese themes have been present in her work for over a decade, since her first visits to Japan and her fascination with its culture, aesthetics and architecture. In the collection created with Sonia Hensler, she interpreted Japanese erotic drawings, shunga woodcuts, and in the Kawaii collection, she explored the concept of constructing sexuality, delving beneath the surface of what the figure of pleasure is. In Hawrot’s view, clothing is not only a means of self-expression, but also a kind of language through which we can communicate with our surroundings, shape ourselves in relation to them and situate in a cultural narrative. It has a highly performative function. Clothing becomes a consciously used costume through which one can achieve presence and visibility. Agency is its main role.

Interestingly, in her project for Expo 2025, the artist was intrigued by the phenomenon of junihitoe, which originated in the Heian period (794–1185). The twelve layers she refers to allude to formal court attire worn by Japanese aristocrats and court ladies from the early 10th century onwards. Such attire varied in colour and decoration depending on social status, wealth, occasion (e.g. wedding ceremonies, coronations) and season. What remained unchanged, however, was that with each layer (including caftans, skirts, veils) the woman wearing it was deprived of her feminine attributes and freedom of movement, reduced to the role of a puppet. The silks were heavy and stiff, and the entire outfit could weigh up to 20 kilograms, requiring the help of others to put it on and take it off. Indeed, a woman could communicate her status and sense of good taste by carefully selecting fabrics, but she was not allowed to express much else.

What was a symbol of dignity and elegance during the Heian period and in the centuries that followed has become a sign of the inability to express oneself in modern times. The symbolic and even ritualistic restraint of women, so fascinating to European audiences, has been interpreted in a perverse and transgressive way in the works of Japanese artists, such as Nagisa Oshima in his 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses and the work of photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki subjected a model already bound in a kimono to a kinbaku session (the Japanese art of binding the body with ropes), focusing on her sexuality and, in this perverse way, liberating her from the role of a passive male object of desire.

Opening of the exhibition 'Wearable Art - Unseen Threads', Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Osaka, 31 May 2025, photo: Filip Tarasiuk/PAIH

Longing for Touch

In Hawrot’s work, fabric has equally precise meanings, but it serves a different form of communication. In the collection of the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, she was fascinated by fabrics by Polish artists from the 1st Lausanne Textile Biennale in 1962, a revolutionary event in terms of the use of materials, the perception of the role of the artist and the themes of the works themselves. It was then that the roles of artist and craftsman were merged, and from that moment on, artists not only designed fabrics, but also made them by hand, using elements that were not necessarily traditional, such as sisal strings, strips of leather – anything that was at hand.

The themes also changed. Instead of genre scenes and historical representations, fabric became a means of expressing emotions, a tool for exorcising the traumas of war. The Polish team in Lausanne consisted mainly of women, including Jolanta Owidzka, Ada Kierzkowska and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Apart from the latter, Hawrot was also intrigued by the works of Wojciech Sadley, an artist with a rather feminine sensibility, as Joanna says. She chose his Całuny (Shrouds), a series of 12 works created in 2012, as the leitmotif for her fabrics, which, in her own interpretation, were digitally printed on denim and silk in the legendary factory in Milanówek.

The collection comes in four colour schemes. The red colour brings something primal to mind. Perhaps it is a cross-section of human tissue, or clots of menstrual blood. Burgundy fading into plum and blue also represent Całuny, while the navy blue colour scheme refers to Magdalena Abakanowicz’s spatial fabrics, which was the most difficult part of the work. How to take away the essence of tapestries, their three-dimensional texture, and create something equally tangible on a flat silk surface? The black and white outfits are Sadley again, but this time they seem to be inspired by Japanese calligraphy (as in Kyuyoh Ishikawa’s work). One may notice casual ink blots, which are a contradiction to Japanese attentiveness and love of order.

In a way, this symbolises the duality of contemporary Japanese culture. On the one hand, there is a striving for regularity and control over the chaos of reality, a focus on detail and the essence of the moment, visible in the tea ceremony or haiku poems; on the other, a subconscious striving for entropy, visible in the architecture of modern Japanese cities, where futuristic metal buildings stand side by side with dilapidated huts cobbled together from a dozen or so planks. In Japan, there is the formal rigidity of traditional rituals, the cool sensuality of the concept of iki, based on the constant seduction of the viewer without the possibility of fulfilment, and a tendency towards exaggeration and cheap decoration, which takes aesthetics into the realm of kitsch. Where exactly does the essence of today’s Japan lie?

The illusion that a tourist can become even a little Japanese by wearing a kimono and traditional wooden geta clogs does not answer this question. Even the richly embroidered kimonos, which are increasingly rare among geisha on the streets of Tokyo or Kyoto, are a kind of charade, a theatre of illusion. As in kabuki theatre, where the precisely applied make-up and costumes of an elegant court lady conceal a businessman from Osaka (to paraphrase Alex Kerr).

'Wearable Art – Unseen Threads' - Joanna Hawrot in Osaka [IMAGE GALLERY]

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Time of Liberation

However, the costumes sewn by Hawrot have a different function. Each of the twelve layers of junihitoe is designed to inspire a story about a contemporary woman. Six of them were interpreted by the aforementioned voguing dancers, who construct femininity through gestures and costumes, sometimes creating hyper-feminine characters, as if multiplied in their gender. The remaining six were made for Japanese women selected by the Japanese team Daimaru, responsible for the production of this part of the project. A teenager, a hostess, a transgender person and an elderly woman are examples of types representing different facets of Japanese femininity.

The artist, together with photographer Zuza Krajewska, who was invited to participate in the project, dressed them in kimonos and took photos on the streets of Osaka. With a large dose of spontaneity, they chose ‘in-between’ locations – roadsides, areas around rubbish bins, hotel corridors – unrepresentative places that people pass through quickly on their way to their destination. In these random locations, mentally belonging to no one, they allowed the protagonists to find their own meaning. The social position of women in Japan is far from European equality. That is why, in her experiment, Hawrot put her designs on the women, deliberately not removing their private clothes so as not to take away their identity. She gave them attention and agency, allowing them to be themselves in their natural environment. She did not make them the subject of her vision, but engaged in dialogue with them.

This seemingly small detail became a very emotional experience for both sides, which was captured in photographs and film. Ultimately, this project is about the artist’s desire to get closer to other people and about the fact that we are all connected by the invisible threads mentioned in the title. This experiment, which blends reportage, documentary and performance, was on display from 31 May to 24 June 2025 in a department store with a long tradition of supporting the craftsmanship of Japanese artists. Joanna Hawrot essentially took over the windows of the luxurious Daimaru Shinsaibashi centre, as her works adorned four windows and seven spaces between floors, as well as occupying a gallery on the eighth floor.

One of the components of the scenography was 34 large-format curtains, dedicated to the works of Wojciech Sadley, but also present for years in other Hawrot projects. On the lowest ‘red’ window, mannequins seem to emerge from a large vagina painted on fabric. Curtains have been used in Japanese homes for centuries to circulate air during hot and stuffy summer periods, as well as to create intimacy in living spaces. All kinds of screens and curtains serve as portable walls and interior decorations. We could also see sliding shoji walls with paintings on framed paper and horizontal emaki scrolls, where calligraphic text is intertwined with illustrations (they flourished in the 10th–12th centuries). Finally, noren, curtains of various lengths made of linen or cotton – in the Heian period, they were hung in front of the entrance to the house, and much later began to replace the doors of shops and premises, which placed their logos on them, inviting guests to enter.

Joanna Hawrot invites viewers into her world in the same way, creating a kind of situation on the top floor of the gallery where visitors can move among mannequins dressed in her kimonos. One figure watches a film shot in Osaka, while the others sit at a table with red wax hearts by Angelika Markul, symbolising complete emotional exposure (literally: ‘heart on a plate’). Another holds a heart in her hand and looks at Osaka through a glass wall. How can the city remain unmoved by this?

^{Bibliography: ‘The Structure of Iki’, Shuzo Kuki, Karakter Publishing House, 2017;}^{Lost Japan}^{by Alex Kerr, Penguin Books, 2015;}^{Meiji Japan: From Tradition to Modernity}^{, NOZOMI Publishing House, 2006;}^{Japanese Aesthetics and Art: Selected Issues}^{by Beata Kubiak Ho-Chi, Universitas Publishing House, 2009;}^{Asian Cultures Through the Eyes of Female Artists. Cultural Identity in Contemporary Art}^{by Magdalena Furmanik-Kowalska, Polish Institute of World Art Studies, 2024}

Translated by Aneta Romańska

Language English

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japanese culture in warsaw