An Embroidered History: Kimonos in the Longfellow Collection

This StoryMap surveys the kimonos in the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters collection, purchased by Charles “Charley” Appleton Longfellow (1844-1893) during his twenty-month stay in Japan from 1871-1873.  

We’ll examine the kimonos as art pieces, tracing their provenance, as well as the historical context of their purchase and collection. Through objects, photographs, and transcripts from the collection, we’ll also look at Charley’s personal recorded history surrounding his trip to Japan, raising questions about tourism, imposed foreign view, and cultural difference.   

Let’s take a look at some of kimonos in the collection, which showcase different types of kimonos and a variety of fabrics, construction techniques, and design motifs.

On this scrap from Charley’s papers, he has written in script a list of kimonos given to (or received from) women of his acquaintance.

"Chirimen" is next to several of the women’s names, referring to the kimono’s silk crepe, a material made by a traditional weaving technique that gives the cloth a crimped or wrinkled texture.

Several of the kimonos in the collection, like the green kimono above, are examples of chirimen. 

Worn as an outer layer without an obi or sash, this type of kimono was typically used for formal events, especially weddings. Longer than a typical kimono, the uchikake was intended to trail behind the wearer, usually with a padded hem to protect it from excessive wear.

Short overcoat designed to be worn over kimono, making the ensemble more formal.  

Under-kimono intended to prevent primary kimono from coming into direct contact with skin, keeping it clean for the next use. Collar is usually visible under primary kimono.

These kimonos come from a pivotal time in Japan’s sartorial history.  

Prior to the 1850s, Japan was closed to foreign trade and visitors in an effort to preserve Japanese progress and culture. During the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan’s ports opened for the first time after this isolation, welcoming a wide array of foreign imports to the domestic market.  

One of these foreign imports, of course, was clothes. Western-style dress became somewhat synonymous with modernity and progress, Japanese culture began shifting to favor Western clothes over native dress.  According to scholar Terry Satsuki Milhaupt, “the major incentive for the Japanese to adopt Western-style dress was to appear more like members of other nations – nations they feared would try to dominate them” (62). 

Accordingly, Emperor Meiji first began wearing Western garments formally in 1872, while the empress made the switch in 1887. This had wide reaching influence among the imperial elite, as well as government officials and military personnel, who both adopted Western-style suits and uniforms in 1872.  

With bureaucrats, military, police, and even students choosing Western wear, Japanese-style dress became symbolic of traditional Japanese identity. The kimono, meaning ‘thing to wear,’ became an emblem of tradition, its adornment considered a preservation of cultural heritage. 

Those who worked in commerce, as laborers, or craftsmen often still wore Japanese dress. For others, resistance to adopting Western clothing became a matter of national pride.

This was the case for cultural critic and art scholar Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913) who often went abroad to promote traditional Japanese art, including several trips to Boston (all after Charley’s death in 1893). Witnessing the cultural shifts firsthand in both Japan and America, he made this statement reflecting on the consequences of Western influence on Japanese art and culture:  

The possibility that Japanese art may become a thing of the past is a matter of sympathetic concern to the esthetic community of the West. It should be known that our art is suffering not merely from the purely utilitarian trend of modern life, but also an inroad of Western ideas … Those Europeans and American connoisseurs who appreciate our efforts may not realize that the West, as a whole, is constantly preaching the superiority of its own culture and art to those of the East. (Milhaupt, 173)

How do we respectfully experience cultures different from our own?  

Note that in this section, we’ll explore how Charley and his family members engaged with their ideas of Japan, using direct quotes from their journals and letters, some of which include racist language.  

Charley Longfellow’s journals reveal a tension between Western and Japanese style of dress as he and his fellow foreigners traversed the country.

Some of Charley’s observations were more documentary, revealing his interest in traditional Japanese dress.

In a letter to his sister Alice Longfellow on August 14, 1871, Charley wrote:

I have not yet described their court dress. They wear on their heads tied under the chin by a white cord, a queer little black silk skull cap with a high knob at the back, from which a strip of figured crepe hangs like a plume. Their hair is all drawn up under this.

Along with this description, he included an accompanying doodle.

However, Charley's journals sometimes reveal a sense of cultural conflict due to the difference between the sartorial styles.

During one of his first weeks there, July 20, 1871, Charley made note of this clash during a trip to Asakusa:

Curious city by night. Colored per lanterns. Crowds half-naked. Street vendors of toys, sweetmeats, etc. Paddled up [the] Sumidagawa to [a] teahouse. [Charles E.] De Long wouldn’t take his shoes off, so [they] wouldn’t let us in. Tried another [with] better success. River [was] covered with pleasure parties in covered boat—singing and girls playing on the samisen.

DeLong’s refusal to take his shoes off indoors and ultimately being denied entrance reveals the disparate cultural expectations between these Western tourists and Japanese hosts. DeLong chose not to abide by this sartorial rule, instead choosing to circumvent it by finding another teahouse that accommodated their Western customs. Charley’s quick pivot to describing the pleasure parties perhaps suggests how this broken rule was of little significance to both him and DeLong.

Despite being well-traveled and exposed to a myriad of cultures at this point in his life, Charley held onto some core beliefs about the supposed superiority of Western practices and ideals. Racism underlies his journals, as Charley commented frequently on their dress as an implication of their civility (or lack thereof, in his opinion). 

In a letter to his sister Annie Longfellow on Sept 11, 1872, Charley made such clear:  

Though to the world they are making great strides towards civilization, with their telegraph, railroad twenty miles long, and foreign clothes—in heart and even in actions they seem to be going backwards.

The next month, in another letter to his father on October 23, 1872, Charley did not hold back on his derisive and dehumanizing remarks about Japanese dress:

It was very interesting to see the courtiers all turn out in their old court costumes (by order), and they looked very well and at home in them—instead of like a lot of hand-organ monkeys as they do in their every day European clothes.

In spite of his degrading disapproval of the Japanese adopting a Western style of dress, Charley often did the cultural cross-dressing he so opposed, shedding his Western garments to adorn the clothing of the Japanese.  

Many of these instances of his cultural cross-dressing were photographed, sometimes even commissioned by Charley himself to record his new personas in a newly acquired kimono or custom happi.  

As Japanese art historian Christine M. E. Guth explains: “tourists authenticated their experience abroad by going to a studio where they could avail themselves of the selection of costumes kept for the express purpose of dressing for the camera” (127).

For a tourist like Charley, it was important that his travels were proven genuine—both as a testament to his adventurous spirit and an assertion of ownership over this culture. 

Here are some of the personas Charley embodied by wearing Japanese clothing, some of which belong to the Longfellow House collections today.

In his letters home, several mentions of “Japanese gowns” show how the kimonos made a notable impression on the girls back home. 

His sister Edith Longfellow, on October 18, 1872 pleaded:  

“Please don’t forget to get me a wadded Japanese gown! There’s a good boy! I wrote about it once before and I shall be ever so obliged if you can find me one.”  

Charley ultimately fulfilled his sisters’ requests, informing his father—albeit with a snide remark dismissive of both the kimonos and the women’s wishes—in a letter sent on February 10, 1873: 

“Please tell the girls I have got them those ‘nice warm Japanese dressing gowns.’ I think they are anything but nice, but one can never tell what girls will like…”  

Edith, not yet privy to this information, sent another letter a week later on the 17th, closing with one last reminder:  

“I hope you have not forgotten to get me a Japanese dressing gown, for if you have I shall be dreadfully disappointed.”

Their interest in kimonos reflects how non-Japanese consumerism impacted what the kimono symbolized in the late 19th century. Their language is especially telling; referring to the kimonos as dressing gowns, the family unwittingly demoted these pieces of clothing to informal garments meant to be worn leisurely around the house. What was once “worn in Japan as an everyday or formal garment was increasingly transformed in new markets into loungewear in the form of ‘dressing gowns’ or ‘tea gowns’” (Milhaupt, 234).  

To this family in Cambridge, the kimono became an essential souvenir, a symbol of the foreign and exotic Japanese culture that they could house in their own homes.  

How do you interact with different cultures in your own life? 

Once home, Charley transformed his room into what would be known as the “Japan Room” (now the Longfellow House’s curator office), decorating it from floor to ceiling with the boxes full of art, furniture, and other objects from his travels. In her journal, his sister Annie described it as “almost entirely Japanese throughout” (October 4, 1874).  

He dispersed the objects he didn’t keep amongst friends and family, including the kimonos requested by his sisters. The Japan Room also became a shared resource, a social hub where friends and family gathered to admire the paper fans pasted on the ceiling, listen to Charley’s tales of travel, and even try on kimonos themselves. 

For Edith's twenty-first birthday on October 25, 1874, she explained in a letter to Alice: 

We had a great time up in the middle of the night to see the eclipse last night. The Jap [sic] dressing gowns were at a premium and we saw the whole eclipse very well. 

In another letter on November 3rd of the same year, Edith describes how she, with several of her friends, came home “with Charlie and soon ‘as usual’ adjourned to his room where he gave us each a lovely ... dress. I am going to have mine made over a light blue silk ... He is such a generous boy!”

Charley’s cousin, Mary King Longfellow, was another recipient of the kimonos as a souvenir from his travels. Close to her cousin Charley, Mary was intrigued by Japanese culture and spent much time with him as he recounted his travels, as well as admiring and even copying the art that he brought home. She also documented several occasions of dress-up with her gifted kimonos.

In a diary entry on April 12, 1875, she recounted her day with her cousins: “spent the day in Charley’s room & I stood for Ernest [Longfellow] to paint me in Japanese costume.”  

In another entry on February 19, 1893, Mary wrote:

Read to C.[Charley] Had calls from Alice Smith and from Joe [Thorp] who came after dinner and photographed me in the Jap. [sic] dress. As both Alice and Miss Chase went out I kept it on the rest of the evening and C. and I had tea on a little table drawn up to the fire. 

In 1884, Mary and her sister hosted a “Japanese tea” as a fundraiser, complete with Japanese furnishings and art that Charley had either gifted her family or borrowed from the Craigie House. To add to the spectacle, “visitors paid $1.00 for the thrill of trying on Japanese ‘dressing gowns’—kimonos Mary had borrowed from Charley to entice women to attend the event” (Guth, 185). At the fundraiser, the kimonos were used as costumes symbolic of a culture exotic to Mary and her peers.  

By appropriating the kimonos for their use, both Charley and Mary impressed their own ideas of Japan and its culture onto the garments. Whether photographed on Charley as the “gentleman from Kyoto” or worn by white women like Mary as a costume, to the Longfellows and their social circle, the kimono came to embody the foreign, a visual representation of “us” and “them” thinking.  

However, the kimonos were much more than elaborate costumes or loungewear. Today, we have the research and perspective that the Longfellows lacked, allowing us to recognize the cultural context, beauty, and skill of the kimonos’ design and craftmanship. 

Has art ever impacted your perceptions of another culture?  

As art pieces, 19th century kimonos can be found in several collections across New England museums, including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art—to name a few. Charley Longfellow’s collection at the House, though, is unique because of its provenance and context, allowing us to better grasp the kimonos’ significance to their collectors.  

With this context, the kimono collection's historical significance is two-fold: first, it allows us to trace the evolution of kimonos from everyday garments in pre-Meiji Japan to symbols of national identity under Emperor Meiji’s rule; and second, it shows their transformation into souvenirs of Charley’s travels, then to art pieces in the Longfellow House’s museum collection. 

These changes, decades in the making, invite us to reflect on an object’s power to shape our ideas about people and places, and the roles we play in creating that power.  

Interested in pulling on some more threads? Here are some places to start:  

• For a broader history of the kimono:  The Surprising History of the Kimono  
• For more about the first Americans in Japan (1853-1854):  MIT Visualizing Cultures: Black Ships & Samurai  
• For a database of historical photographs of Meiji Japan:  Japanese Old Photographs of the Bakumatsu-Meiji Periods Collection  
• For a modern case of public dialogue about kimonos, art, and cultural appropriation:  Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ 2015 kimono exhibit  
• For more about Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) stories told at the NPS:  AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study (nps.gov)  

Note for researchers: For more information on primary documents and images, check out  research opportunities at the Longfellow House  or email research requests to  LONG_archives@nps.gov .

All Charley Longfellow journals and correspondence excerpted from Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871-1873.

Correspondence and photographs in the Charles Appleton Longfellow (1844–1893) Papers, 1842–1996, (LONG 27888), Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. ( Finding Aid available online )

Journals in the Mary King Longfellow (1852-1945) Papers (LONG 35729), Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. ( Finding Aid available online )

Guth, Christine M. E. Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. 

Heald, Sarah H. The Longfellow House: Historical Furnishings Report. National Park Service, 1999.  

Hight, Eleanor M. Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 

"Kimono Patterns." Kateigaho International: Japan Edition. Sekai Bunka Publishing Inc, 2021. https://int.kateigaho.com/tag/kimono/.

Laidlaw, Christine Wallace, ed. Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871-1873. Cambridge: Friends of the Longfellow House, 1998. 

Luu, Sophia and Ellen McKinney. "Kimono: elucidating meanings of Japanese textile artifacts for a museum audience." Anais Do Museu Paulista: História E Cultura Material 29 (2021): 1-45. doi: 10.1590/1982-02672021v29e9.

Milhaupt, Terry Satsuki. Kimono: A Modern History. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2014.

Nitanai, Keiko. Kimono Design: An Introduction to Textiles and Patterns. Tuttle Publishing, 2017.