When I get into a fabric store, sometimes the fabrics speak to me. They sometimes tell me what they want to be. When I saw this fabric, I knew it had to be a haori for someone very specific.
At the time I saw the fabric, I couldn’t have told you why I felt it would make a beautiful haori. I just knew it would. The fabric’s machine embroidery is very much in the style of the embroidery you see a Spanish shawl called a ‘Mantón’, often worn by women on festive occasions or used as props by flamenco dancers. What I didn’t know is that they have another name: manila shawls.
Manila is, I’m sure you know, the capital of the Philippines, which was a Spanish colony between 1565 and 1898. This gave them access to the Chinese silk trade. These large squares of embroidered silk became a very lucrative Asian export in the 19th Century. If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the manila shawl, there’s an excellent video on it here.
So, while I wasn’t consciously aware of it, my subconscious must have recognised that there was an Asian spirit speaking through the style of embroidery that had ended up being machine-embroidered onto that piece of lyocell. It isn’t even a fabric I would normally choose, but the earliest mantóns were actually made of banana leaf or pineapple leaf fibres, which is quite close to what lyocell is.
As you can see, the fabric is fairly translucent, and the underside of the machine embroidering is not a thing of beauty, so I chose a lining of matching cream lyocell. I also knew that the machine embroidery was too stiff to be used for the collar part, so the lining fabric would also have to be used to construct the collar. I would have loved to find a eye-popping bright red lining to match the flowers, but I could only find the right colour in an organic dyed cotton, and I knew – I just knew – no amount of pre-washing would stop it from bleeding onto the outer fabric. So I settled for cream. For some reason, Jacques, my Vietnamese street cat was also extremely enamoured of the fabric and kept trying to make biscuits on it, which wasn’t ideal, as it damaged the embroidery a little.
Instead of using the haori construction I was most familiar with, I used the one detailed in the House of Kimono Haori pattern. In retrospect, that was a bit of a mistake. His pattern uses rectangular plackets under the arms, which gives the garment more width. This would not have been an issue had I been using a lighter, less structurally complicated fabric, and it would be a huge plus if it were intended to be worn over big-bowed obi at the back, but that’s not how this garment is going to be worn, and I cannot say I feel the side panels do much for the garment.
I’m embarrassed to admit it took me ages to get up the courage to cut into this fabric. I worried about which way up the embroidered flowers were going to sit. Because the haori, like the kimono, is one continuous strip from the hem at the back, over the shoulders, to the hem at the front, I worried for weeks as to whether the flowers should be growing ‘upwards’ on the back of the jacket or on the front of it. I finally decided that, since the front was going to have the plain cream collar on both sides of the opening, the direction of the flowers didn’t matter so much. It was on the back where the embroidery would really show itself fully. For that same reason, I did not put a seam into the back of the haori; I left it as one piece and simply cut out the neck and opening area at the front.
I am pleased to say that I’ve done enough of these now not to fight the fabric. I just kind of flattered it along. The lyocell’s raw edges have a propensity to shed, so even though the piece was going to be lined, I felt the need to finish all the raw edges off, and I did that with a very tight zig-zag stitch by machine, since it would be hidden by the lining, but the rest of the garment was all sewn by hand.
Once the collar gets attached, there’s really no going back without a lot of tears, so making sure the lining was sitting exactly right before I started stitching was really important. Those little plastic clips, holding the kata-yama of both layers nice and secure turned out to be very helpful.
This is not the sort of garment I feel comfortable wearing. It is very much a statement garment. Since the woman I made it for dyes her hair a rich, vibrant garnet, I sensed she would not mind standing out in a crowd. I think this haori would definitely do that.