Kimono: Fashioning Culture

Another Eastern fashion innovation is spotlighted by anthropologist Liza Dalby (Geisha) in Kimono: Fashioning Culture. When Dalby spent a year as a geisha in Kyoto in the 1970s, she found that the most difficult part of her work was wearing the kimono. Her experience inspired this exhaustive chronicle of the history and social meanings of the robe. Dalby is particularly concerned with how the confining robe in which women can't, among other things, cross their legs clashed with creeping Westernization in the last century, giving rise to such controversies as the 1920s skirmish over what kind of underwear should properly be worn with the kimono. ( Feb.)