Sorry, looks like we don't have enough of this product.
Tokyo-inspired, in your wardrobe.
Obi belts woven in the tradition of Nishijin Kyoto — silk brocade, satin cotton, hand-finished knots — twenty-three pieces cut for kimono, yukata and jinbei wear. Maru, fukuro, nagoya, hanhaba and kaku obi for women and men, in black, white, red, gold, camel and floral patterns from the Edo to Meiji canon.
The obi belt isn't really a belt. It's the structural piece that holds a Japanese kimono together — physically, visually, ceremonially. A kimono without an obi falls open. A kimono with the wrong obi reads as costume. The obi has carried the formal weight of Japanese dress since the Heian period, and the way it is tied, knotted and folded has signaled rank, age, occupation and occasion for over a thousand years.
The catalog runs across twenty-three obi belts — twelve for men at $45 and eleven for women at $80 — covering the five main historical types and the full range of formal-to-casual contexts. Silk satin for ceremonial wear. Thick cotton for daily kimono and yukata. Brocade with woven floral patterns for the traditional formal range. Each piece is named after a Japanese city or season, the way the original Nishijin obi were classified.
The earliest obi was a simple narrow cord — closer to a rope than to a textile — used during the Nara and Heian periods to hold the loose-fitting kosode garment in place. The form widened slowly through the Kamakura and Muromachi eras as the kimono itself became more structured. By the Edo period, from the seventeenth century onward, the obi had become the dominant element of Japanese dress, sometimes wider than thirty centimeters and often more elaborately decorated than the kimono it accompanied. This is when the production hub of Nishijin in northwestern Kyoto established itself as the center of obi weaving, supplying the imperial court and the samurai aristocracy with brocades that took hundreds of hours to weave.
By the Meiji era at the end of the nineteenth century, the obi had reached the silhouette most international buyers recognize today. Standard widths, defined types, established knot patterns. The Nishijin-Ori weaving technique remained the gold standard for formal silk obi, with the most expensive examples carrying gold-thread brocade patterns that took weeks of work and routinely cost more than the entire kimono they accompanied. That tradition still exists in Kyoto today, with master weavers producing obi belts that retail in the four-figure range. The catalog here sits at the accessible end of the spectrum, but uses the same construction logic — woven rather than printed, finished by hand at the seams, built to be tied and re-tied for years.
Five types of obi belts cover the whole formal-to-casual spectrum. The maru obi is the most traditional and elaborate — a wide strip of fabric folded in half so the front and back are identical, traditionally used for the highest-formality occasions like weddings and tea ceremonies. The maru obi has fallen out of daily use because of its weight and elaborate decoration, but remains the silhouette evoked by formal Japanese imagery. The fukuro obi is the contemporary formal standard — same width as the maru but lighter, with decoration on one face and a plainer lining on the other, sewn in two parts for ease of wear. Most formal kimono outfits today pair with a fukuro obi.
The nagoya obi was developed in Nagoya in the early twentieth century and has become the everyday formal choice — shorter than the fukuro, with sections pre-folded to make the standard taiko musubi drum knot easier to tie. The hanhaba obi is half the width of the fukuro and sits at the casual end of the women's range — paired with summer yukata, with cotton kimono for daily wear, and with the more relaxed jinbei silhouettes. The kaku obi is the men's standard — narrower than women's obi at around ten centimeters, longer to allow the three-wrap men's tying technique, and almost always in cotton or stiffer brocade rather than silk. The obi heko is the softest of the men's range, originally part of Satsuma province soldiers' uniforms during the early Meiji era, now the casual choice for men's yukata in summer.
The women's obi belts in the catalog run at $80 and use satin cotton, fabric brocade and the heavier weaves that hold the elaborate knots required for women's tying conventions. Black obi belts (Tachibana) read as the most formal and pair with any kimono color. White obi belts (Ume) carry the floral white-on-white delicacy traditional in spring and summer kimono. Red obi belts (Shôchikubai) reference the pine-bamboo-plum motif that signals celebration and is traditionally worn at New Year and other ceremonial occasions. Yellow obi belts (Nanten) and gold obi belts (Sanaé) anchor the brighter end of the formal range. The Nadeshiko purple satin and Koshiko camel floral pieces sit in the middle range — formal enough for ceremonies, soft enough for less ritualized wear.
The men's obi belts in the catalog run at $45 and use thick cotton in stripes, solids and traditional patterns. Each is named after a Japanese city — Kyoto, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka, Okinawa, Sapporo, Himeji, Hikoma, Nahako, Niigata, Okayama. The cotton runs heavier than women's obi to support the three-wrap men's tying technique, and the colors stay restrained — grey, white, navy, striped patterns rather than floral brocade. Men's obi pair with yukata in summer, with formal kimono for ceremonies, and increasingly with the jinbei and samue silhouettes that have crossed into contemporary Japanese loungewear.
Tying an obi takes practice, but the basic logic is consistent across types. The belt wraps twice around the waist for women and three times for men, with the knot positioned at the back center for formal women's wear and at the front or side for less formal contexts. The taiko musubi — the drum knot — is the most common formal woman's knot and is what most fukuro and nagoya obi are pre-shaped to produce. Men's obi typically tie in the simpler kai-no-kuchi knot, a flat shell-shape positioned at the back. For yukata in summer, women often tie a chocho musubi — the butterfly knot — that reads more casual than the formal drum knot.
The contemporary Tokyo wardrobe has expanded the obi well beyond traditional kimono contexts. Younger Japanese designers pair obi belts with western dresses, denim jeans, oversized blazers, and even with cropped trousers in the layered style that has come out of Harajuku and Aoyama since the early 2010s. A black satin obi tied loose over a plain shirtdress reads as contemporary streetwear rather than traditional dress. The catalog is built for both — for the traditional kimono and yukata wear that anchors the obi tradition, and for the contemporary Japanese street style that has been re-interpreting the form for the last fifteen years.
