Kosode
Originating in the Heian period as an undergarment for both men and women, the was a plain white garment, typically made of silk, worn directly next to the skin. Both men and women wore layered, wrap-fronted, wide-sleeved robes on top of the , with the style of layering worn by women of the Imperial Japanese courtknown as the , literally "twelve layers"featuring a greater number of robes than were seen on men. The would also be worn as sleeping wear alongside a pair of . Following dress edicts designed to decrease the number of layered garments worn at court, the gradually became outerwear from roughly the Kamakura period onwards. Styles of wearing the such as layering two and wearing the uppermost robe stripped off from the shouldersbecame popular, alongside a number of newly-developed textile decoration techniques, such as dyeing and embroidery, used to decorate the garment. Initially undyed, the dyed came in the Muromachi period, peaked in popularity in the Momoyama period, and faded out in the Keicho period and Edo period. Methods used for decoration included ("Chinese textile") silk fabrics, which mimicked embroidery through the use of floating silk yarns and gilt-paper strips, and the elaborate technique of combination dyework and embroidery, until both were restrained by sumptuary laws and the development of . The 's proportionsa wide body and comparatively narrow sleevesgradually evened out over time, before coming to resemble those of a modern kimono around the Edo period. The sleeves on some women's also got longer and began to detach from the body below the shoulder, a style allowing the to become wider over time. The component parts of a are roughly similar to those of a kimono, with the only major differences being the proportions of each aspect in comparison to those of a modern kimono. The width of the loom, and hence the (fabric bolt) used for was significantly larger than that for , and the sleeves and collar were also cut and hemmed to different widths. In the Keichō period (1596–1615, just before the Edo period), the width of the fabric bolt used for a was about , and the sleeves were made of one-half width. The (cuff opening) was narrow, the (width of the neck opening) was narrow, the (collar length) was long, and the was short.
History
The was a type of short-sleeved Japanese garment, and the direct predecessor of the kimono.