The exchange of envoys between the two countries led to the Japanese Imperial Court adopting Chinese culture, including, among others, clothing, which consisted of wrapped-front garments with long sleeves of both a closed-neck and open-neck nature.

Kimono are made from long, thin bolts of cloth known as tanmono, are sewn with mostly straight seams, and are held together by small ties known as koshihimo and an obi belt.

[12]: 22  Kimono differ slightly in construction for men, women and children, and the choice of fabric, colour and decorative techniques can signify the wearer's age, gender, formality of occasion and — less commonly — marital status.

[12]: 24 Garments outside of the samurai classes within the collection feature rich decoration from the waist-down only, with family crests on the neck and shoulders, a style known as tsuma moyō.

[12]: 29–30  Samurai men typically dressed with a more understated style, exemplified by items in the collection featuring geometric designs concentrated around the waist.

[12]: 9  The Japanese textile industry rapidly Westernised in the face of foreign weaving technologies, and silk from Tokyo's factories became the principle export of Japan.

[15] Cheaper synthetic dyes in the following decades meant that both purples and red - previously restricted to the wealthy elite - could now be owned by anyone,[12]: 118  though they retained their symbolic importance of representing wealth and power.

However, the process of modernisation was still slow, and a more typical representation of Meiji period underclothes found in the Collection is women's under-kimono, made of different pieces of fabric, often with radically different colours and designs; these under-kimono, known as dōnuki, were often made from old kimono that had become unwearable, resulting in a sometimes complex, often symmetrical patchwork of motifs and fabrics, and were a common use for old kimono until the Taisho period, when it was no longer economically viable to make one's own clothing in the face of cheaper ready-to-wear garments.

[12]: 137  For men, under-kimono often featured highly-decorative and often heavily pictorial scenes that would then be covered entirely by the outer kimono, which was typically very plain or designed with a simple and subtle pattern.

Example of men's under-kimono within the collection display depictions of performers, dancers and haiku poems; one piece combines postcard-like scenes of Japan's progress with a textual diary of the Meiji era.

"common silk stuff") became immensely popular, particularly following the devastating 1923 Great Kantō earthquake,[20] after which ready-to-wear meisen kimono became widely sold following the loss of many people's possessions.

[12]: 251–252 Mass-produced garments in new, cheap fibres such as rayon used printing to cheaply imitate traditional dyeing processes;[21] the kimono of young children, particularly during the 1930s and 40s, was often made of rayon, and was commonly printed with mass-produced modern designs, with the imagery on young boy's kimono reflecting this especially heavily through designs of skyscrapers, cars and planes.

[12]: 165  The Collection also has examples of highly-pictographic contemporary kimono, whose decoration celebrates modern forms of transport including ocean liners.

Kimono: The Art and Evolution of Japanese Fashion, edited by Anna Jackson, first published in English in 2015 with French and Italian translations.

[2] It describes, with photographs, 220 items from the collection, including essays explaining how the evolution of the kimono reflected political, social and cultural changes in Japan.