MEN’S KIMONO
From 5 December 2025 to 4 April 2026
Venice, Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo
Curated by
Lydia Manavello
Silvia Vesco
In collaboration with
Museo d’Arte Orientale Venezia
The exhibition explores creative and cultural exchanges between Europe and Japan through an exhibition of works that testify to fundamental developments between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
This will illustrate “Japonism”, namely the many European artistic creations of that period that drew on and reinterpreted the expressive and decorative language of Japanese art. These are represented in the exhibition by the works of Hiroshige, Utamaro and Hokusai.
But above all, the purpose is to document the opposite process, namely the phenomenon of “Westernism” in Japan, a little-known development: the influence of Western culture and artistic expression in Japanese aesthetics through the most iconic object of Japanese civilisation, the kimono.
The kimonos on display at Palazzo Mocenigo, in textured, embroidered or printed silk, testify to this attraction for the West and influences derived from the formal innovations of the European avant-gardes, such as Futurism, the Viennese Secession and Cubism, which in the early 20th century profoundly changed the traditional vocabulary of the Japanese decorative arts.
Admission to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.
