Since Covid-19 lock-downs mean that people are unable to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, their current Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk Exhibition has been recorded as a kind of virtual guided tour on YouTube! This is a fantastic set of videos, with all kinds of wonderful information about the modern history of kimono and how kimono has influenced the world over time. You can easily see this set of videos on YouTube, but I thought, why not make it feel even more like you're taking a real visit to the museum? After all, it's not everyday you can pretend to be in London! Here is a Google Maps embedding of the museum. You can scroll around the streets so it feels like you're walking around it!
Now, here are the tour videos, so it really is as though you walked inside!
These videos are brilliant in that they give you facts you probably won't know about kimono, but without inundating you. And you aren't patronized with traditional Japanese Music. Instead, they use contemporary music the way they would with any other art exhibition. This reinforces the message that kimono is far from just a thing of the past: It is a part of the now and it will be part of the future. I also found a video by the Embassy of Japan in the UK of the exhibition. It gives you a greater sense of what the exhibition would be like to view strolling alone:
And for those who want to know more about what might be the edgiest kimono wearer in the world, here is another video by the Victoria and Albert Museum:
When you're done viewing the videos, you can take a virtual visit to cafes not far from the museum, just to make the experience feel a little more real!
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