---
node: fashion_taisho
type: fashion
slug: taisho_era_fashion
title: "Fashion in the Taisho era"
lead: "Taisho was the age of Taisho Roman and the modern girl: city youth took up Western fashion, boldly patterned meisen silk kimono became everyday wear, and the sailor-style school uniform appeared around 1920."
published: 2026-07-27
updated: 2026-08-15
image_file: taisho_era_fashion.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kodomo_no_kuni_magazine,_vol._1_no._12_,_Holding_Hands_by_Yumeji_Takehisa,_December_1922.jpg"
image_author: "Takehisa Yumeji"
image_license: "Public domain"
previous_hash: "412035a65a9b7a03d84c22f9b3e708c119574a2edfc1cf49cf41da68cc057753"
renamed_from: "taisho_era"
change: "Deepened all three sections for SEO deepening wave 11 (thinnest cluster pages)"
requester: internal
reason: "One of the thinnest pages in the period_fashion_en cluster under wave_selection(thinnest_cluster_pages)"
---

## Overview

Taisho is short, urban and disproportionately important. In fifteen years Japanese city life acquired department stores, cafés, cinema and a fashion press, and the clothing that came with them — Western for a visible minority, and a transformed kimono for nearly everyone else.

## Key garments and style

The moga and mobo, the modern girl and modern boy, are the era's image: bobbed hair, cloche hats, dropped-waist dresses and suits, photographed on the Ginza and written about constantly, though they were always a small urban set.

The wider change was in the kimono itself. Meisen — silk woven from threads dyed before weaving, which makes a slightly blurred pattern — was cheap, hard-wearing and machine-produced, and it carried bold Art Nouveau and then Art Deco designs in colours no earlier kimono had used. It was everyday clothing bought ready-made, and it is why Taisho kimono look so unlike Meiji ones.

Schoolgirls wore hakama with laced boots in the haikara style, and from about 1920 the sailor-collar uniform entered girls' schools, where it has stayed.

The 1923 Kanto earthquake pushed the change along: people who fled in kimono found them dangerous to move in, and Western dress gained ground afterwards.

## Transition

Showa carried this modernity into wartime austerity, then into a full switch to Western clothing.