From the 17th to the 20th century the kimono was the principal piece of clothing in Japan for both men and women. But now it’s an inspiration for fashion all over the world

Fashion as we know it – the business of clothes-as-zeitgeist, as distinct from simple dressmaking – was invented in Paris by Louis XIV in the second half of the 17th century. This, at least, is fashion’s widely accepted creation myth. The Sun King and his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, established a luxury fashion industry which enshrined France as the world leader in taste. To help the lavish new court at Versailles eclipse the austere, black-clad glamour of Madrid, they introduced a rigid schedule whereby new fabrics were issued twice a year – not just warmer or lighter to reflect the weather, but in new colours each time – and the fashion “season” was born.

But travel 6,000 miles east to Kyoto, home of the kimono, and the history of fashion looks quite different. In the late 17th century, a demand for luxury textiles among the burgeoning Japanese merchant class grew so fast that by 1700 the narrow streets of the Nishijin district thundered to the clacking of an estimated 7,000 looms. The headquarters of Yamaguchi Genbei’s 10th generation family-run kimono business is testament to the garment’s powerful history. This elegant atelier, where studios with lacquered floors look on to a light-dappled central courtyard, helps tell the story of the kimono as an alternative narrative to a Eurocentric history of elegance. Yamaguchi’s designs, and his family collection of antique kimono, attract visitors from the highest echelons of the fashion industry. When Giorgio Armani visited last year, they spent five hours together. (Mr Armani was particularly taken with an obi with silver embroidery cascading down one vertical seam, a design based on how glaze flows on to a ceramic, Yamaguchi said.) Both Chanel and Nike have also sent sizeable delegations to pay homage to this Kyoto version of an haute couture house. Here in Japan, in other words, fashion has never been about Paris.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kimono for a young woman, 1905–20, probably from Kyoto. Photograph: Courtesy of the Khalili Collection

Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk opens at the V&A later this month, with fashion currently the toast (or at least, the bread-and-butter) of many major museums. Last year’s Dior show at the V&A had 594,994 visitors, the largest in the museum’s history. The kimono exhibition will include box-office showpieces such as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Star Wars robes, a dress designed by Alexander McQueen and worn by Björk on the cover of her album Homogenic and Oscar-winning costumes from Memoirs of a Geisha alongside rare 17th and 18th-century kimono.

The exhibition comes at a time when museum culture in the west is belatedly being interrogated for vestigial traces of imperialism. Meanwhile, cultural appropriation has become an incendiary topic in a fashion industry which finds itself newly answerable to a global audience. Last year, Kim Kardashian was forced to backtrack on a lingerie range she had initially named Kimono. “I understand and have a deep respect for the significance of kimono in Japanese culture,” she said in a statement, changing the name of the line to Skims. In 2013, Katy Perry’s appearance at an award show dressed in a kimono to perform her song “Unconditionally” – sample lyric: “I’ll do it all for you / Because I love you, I love you unconditionally” – drew criticism for playing into erotic fetishisation of subservient Asian women.

“The whole point of this show is that the kimono is something dynamic, not a dusty museum piece,” says Anna Jackson, curator of the V&A exhibition; she argues that the best way to respect the kimono is to tell its story not as artefact or exotic treasure, but as a sophisticated garment that has shaped fashion, reflected society, travelled the globe, fallen from grace and staged comebacks over a tumultuous 400-year history. “If you put the kimono on a pedestal you don’t honour it, you patronise it. It is when you treat the garment as a costume on a shelf, with no life and no future, that you stereotype it.”

The word kimono means, literally, “thing to wear”. A simple, straight-seamed garment, wrapped and secured with an “obi” sash, it was the principal item of dress for men and women in Japan from the mid 16th until the early 20th century. From the interwar period, western influence made itself felt on kimono design – the exhibition catalogue includes a kimono from this period stencilled with the unmistakable graphic silhouette of the Empire State Building – and after 1945 kimono fell out of favour as a “thing to wear” on the streets.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Björk in a kimono designed by Alexander McQueen. Photograph: © Nick Knight/One Little Indian

Once unisex and utilitarian, it was recast as the symbolic regalia of a nostalgic, picturesque version of the country. On the advice of an American consultancy firm hired in the 50s for guidance on how to eradicate the militaristic associations of Japanese aircraft and regain global trust, Japan Airlines dressed its female flight attendants who served cocktails to first class customers in kimono. When worn by a man, however, the kimono retained an ambiguity which was to be used to powerful effect by costume designer John Mollo in the Star Wars films. “George [Lucas] wanted him [Obi-Wan] to look part monk and part Samurai warrior,” Mollo said. The lightsaber which hung from the belt of Obi-Wan’s famous brown kimono was based on the inro – a carrying case for small objects traditionally suspended from the obi, in an early version of the manbag.

In Kyoto, the specialist dealer Konjaku Nishimura carefully dons gloves to unwrap an 18th-century kimono embroidered with cranes – a popular motif for weddings, as cranes are said to mate for life and to live for a thousand years – which has a pricetag of ¥2.5m (£17,600). “If you wore it, you would be ruining it.” Nishimura is wearing a black kimono; his elderly father by his side is in chinos, a blazer and a button-down shirt. The generational gap reflects how, in the past few decades, the kimono has made a comeback among Japanese too young to remember it as streetwear. As well as antique treasures, Nishimura does a brisk trade in kimono sold at Bond Street prices as occasionwear to affluent Japanese women. Jotaro Saito, the fashion designer who recently put denim kimono on a Tokyo fashion week catwalk, sells enough kimono to have a sleek boutique in Tokyo’s Ginza Six mall.

At dusk in Kyoto, temples are crowded with Japanese teenagers who have rented colourful kimono by the day from local shops and are busy taking selfies. It is an indulgent, elegant tradition. The kimono’s cameo roles in western culture – eroticised on screen in Memoirs of a Geisha, or watered down into a sort of ornamental waitress uniform – are only fragments of its many lives on the streets of modern Japan.

We in the west are conditioned to look at where clothing sits in relation to the female body to place it in time. (The bustle-back of Victoriana, the dropped waists of the flappers, the miniskirts of the sixties.) Kimono have been cut to essentially the same pattern for four centuries, the only addition a little extra fabric to keep pace with the increasing average height. It is the colours and patterns, rather than the shape, that come and go. Symbolism in the embroidery shifts, as lucky charms move in and out of fashion – the unicorn, you might say, is the new crane.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christian Dior, haute couture spring-summer 2007. Photograph: Alain Benainous/Gamma-Raplh/Getty Images

When wearing a kimono “the body is irrelevant”, Jackson says. The fulcrum of the garment is placed on the shoulder, not the waist. This concept, radical in womenswear, played a pivotal role in changing how women dressed during the 20th century. In 1903, two decades after the Rational Dress Society began promoting non-restrictive clothing for women, Paul Poiret took the kimono as the starting point for his corset-free fashion which took Paris by storm. From Poiret, the line of fashion succession leads to the box-shaped jackets and straight-lined skirts of Coco Chanel.

Hiroko Takahashi, a fashion designer whose style today is reminiscent of Chanel – the blunt dark fringe, the cool emotional tone, the black boat-neck sweater – started her career designing western-style clothing but now focuses on kimono because, she says, there is no better way of dressing. She is dismissive of the traditional museum-eye view of them, which prizes lavish fabrics and intricate embroidery. “I don’t care how difficult it was to make, or how long it took to make, if the end result isn’t beautiful,” she says. She works only with circles and straight lines which represent, she says, pure elegance. “I want people to realise that we can enjoy life with what things we already have. I am a perfectionist. That’s why I like kimono.”

• Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk opens at the V&A on 29 February.