Friday Photo: Purple Furisode

This is one of the first kimono I ever bought, and is one of the few new ones in my collection. On my first trip to Japan I managed to find the Mimuro shop in Kyoto. It's down little back streets off of Shijo-Dori and can be tough to find, but if you can get there during a sale it's worth it. We're talking multiple floors of everything from yukata (at least in the summer) to tomesode and furisode, for all ages. The time I went they were having a huge sale, and I managed to get this furisode, a fukuro obi, a juban, an obi age, and two obi jime for $700 -- about half the cost of the furisode alone when it was being sold at full price. Not only that, but I got a tour of the other floors and their other goods, completely with getting to see an unfinished all-shibori furisode worth around $20,000 at the time, while waiting for my things to be packed and my payment to be processed. The whole trip was a lot of fun, and was one of my first experiences with the fun experience of surprising people by being a white chick who knew things about kimono (seriously, walk into a kimono shop or the wafuku floor of a department store and start asking for kimono-related items by name. It's awesome).