The Styrous® Viewfinder: Junichi Arai ~ Really, a necktie?

September 30, 2015

Junichi Arai ~ Really, a necktie?

photos by Styrous®

In 1988 and then again later in 1990, I produced a series of fashion shows that featured fabrics of the Japanese fabric designer, Junichi Arai, for the legendary art-to-wear boutique, Obiko. Owner/operator Sandra Sakata gave the designers she featured in her boutique many different Arai fabrics to design whatever garment the fabric inspired them to create. The fashion shows were benefits for The San Francisco Museum of Craft & Folk Art at Fort Mason in San Francisco, California. The museum closed in 2012.

There were scraps of fabric left over from one of the garments and the designer made a tie for me from one of the scraps. Arai’s fabrics were used only in women’s fashion so it’s possible I have the only male article of clothing made of his fabric. I believe there are titanium threads in my tie.

The fabrics Arai produced were astonishing. Arai had learned historical Japanese weaving techniques for obis and kimonos and in 1984 he founded the Nuno Corporation, a company and retailer wholly devoted to fabric – combining old practices with new technologies and materials in innovative and unexpected ways.

Arai was born in 1932 in the city of Kiryu, Japan, where production of silk weaving textiles has been a tradition for over 1,000 years. He is the sixth generation of a mill-owning family.