A Stripe, Broken: The Blue and Red Zigzag of the Shima Shima Books
A stripe, in the Shima Shima books, is never just a stripe. Here the field is a deep indigo blue, and down it run columns of broken chevrons, zigzags stacked and offset, drawn in black with a second zigzag laid over in red, the two rhythms slightly out of step so the whole surface seems to tick. It is the simplest possible idea, a line that keeps changing its mind, and it covers the cloth like weather.
The design comes from the Japanese pattern book tradition of Kyoto, from the stripe collections published by Shimbi Shoin in 1906 that are known collectively by their subject: shima shima, stripes upon stripes, hundreds of them, offered to the kimono trade as patterns to dye and weave. Each page had to earn its place as a working design, and this one solves a real problem beautifully: how to give a striped cloth the energy of a woven pattern using nothing but direction and color.
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Blue and Red Zigzag Japanese Edo Era Vintage Textile Print – Japanese Wall Art
A stripe pattern from the Shima Shima pattern books, Kyoto, 1906, in the Rinpa textile tradition.
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The Pattern Book Tradition
Patterns like this one were published in Kyoto by Shimbi Shoin in 1906, in the pattern books known generally as Shima Shima, shima being the Japanese word for stripes. The books belonged to a much older craft institution, the hinagata-bon, the pattern book from which kimono dyers and weavers worked, and to a distinguished artistic lineage: the Rinpa school, whose great Edo period master Ogata Korin had made bold, flattened natural pattern the height of Japanese design two centuries before. In the Meiji era the Kyoto designer Furuya Korin (1875 to 1910), a pupil of Kamisaka Sekka and a self declared Korin of the modern age, led the school's revival in print, issuing woodblock pattern books meant not as art for its own sake but as working designs for the textile trades. The Shima Shima books stand in that tradition: page after page of stripes, grids and lattices, each one a proposition a dyer could take to the loom or the stencil.
The practical character of the books matters to how the designs look. A hinagata-bon pattern had to survive translation into katazome, stencil dyeing, where a paper stencil cut with the design is laid on cloth and dye paste worked through it, or into weaving, where the pattern lives in the threads themselves. Zigzags are perfect citizens of both crafts: a stencil cutter can repeat a chevron with a few strokes, a weaver can step a warp thread sideways at exact intervals, and the broken, interlocking columns read clearly at the distance of a sleeve.
Why the Zigzag Works
The eye reads a straight stripe as rest. Break the stripe into a zigzag and every band becomes a small argument between left and right, up and down; stack the zigzags in columns and the arguments syncopate. This design doubles the effect by layering two zigzag systems, the larger black chevrons carrying the structure, the thinner red ones cutting across them at a different scale, so the pattern has a beat and a counter beat. The indigo ground is the third instrument: deep, traditional, the color of work clothes and of aizome dyeing across Japan, against which both black and red advance.
There is a modernity in it that the date, 1906, makes startling. Stripped of its textile purpose, the sheet could sit comfortably beside the geometric abstractions European artists would reach a decade later. The Kyoto pattern designers were not imitating the West; if anything the influence ran the other way, through the Japanese pattern books that European publishers had been reprinting since the 1880s for their own design trades. The zigzag page is a reminder that abstract pattern was a craft invention before it was a gallery one.
Reading It as Cloth
Try, finally, to read the design the way its first audience did: not as a picture but as a proposition for a garment. A Kyoto dyer opening the Shima Shima books in 1906 was shopping for movement. On a standing figure the zigzag's columns would hang as verticals, orderly, almost architectural; the moment the wearer walked, the chevrons would shear and slide against one another, the red rhythm slipping against the black, and the cloth would seem to flicker. Stripes were judged by this test above all, what they did in motion, and the broken stripe was prized precisely because it had the most to do.
The indigo ground plays its part in the wearing too. Deep blue flatters every other color set against it and forgives the fading that sunlight and washing bring, which is why it governed Japanese work dress for centuries. In the pattern book the zigzag page keeps that practical wisdom inside its beauty: a dramatic design that would still look right after a summer of wear.
Stripes in Japanese Dress
Striped cloth, shima, held a particular place in Japanese taste. Under the Edo period's sumptuary rules, which pushed commoner dress toward indigo, brown and grey, pattern interest concentrated in exactly this kind of invention: stripe upon stripe, checks, lattices, variations wrung from a restricted palette. By the Meiji era, when the Shima Shima books appeared, the stripe had centuries of connoisseurship behind it, and a Kyoto dyer leafing the book would read this design the way a tailor reads cloth, imagining it moving, folded, worn.
As a print the zigzag keeps that energy. It refuses to sit still as decoration; the broken lines keep restarting the eye's journey down the sheet. Of all the Shima Shima designs, it is the one that most openly shows the book's thesis: that the stripe, the plainest element in the dyer's vocabulary, contains multitudes.
