Collaboration with American art museum puts the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige in the Prussian blue spotlight.

Uniqlo’s UT line of graphic T-shirts are essentially wearable works of art, mobile, short-sleeved display spaces for showing off artistic styles and design aesthetics that speak to you. With Uniqlo being a Japanese fashion brand, a lot of their creative partners are anime or video game franchises, but for their latest collection Uniqlo is going with traditional culture over the pop variety, creating five new T-shirts for what it’s calling the Ukiyo-e Blue line.

Ukiyo-e refers to the woodblock print paintings that reached the height of their popularity during the Edo period (1603-1868). Ukiyo-e masters such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige devoted themselves to capturing and conveying both everyday activities and the beauty of Japan’s most famous landmarks in their works, and in the process created both visual records of what life was like for the common people and an illustrated travelogue of old Japan.

But the “blue” part of the Ukiyo-e Blue collection’s name is important too, and if you’re familiar with Hokusai’s 1831 masterpiece The Great Wave off Kanagawa, seen on the front and back of the shirt pictured above and below, you’ll probably notice that it is indeed looking more blue than it does in its original form. Hokusai was one of the first Japanese painters to use Prussian blue in his works, as the pigment was unavailable in Japan prior to contact with foreign traders in he 1800s, and Hiroshige helped further popularize it for artistic purposes.

Because of that, the shirts in series have been shifted more heavily towards blue hues, and the East-meets-West theming is especially appropriate since Ukiyo-e Blue is a collaboration between Uniqlo and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the most impressive overseas collections of Japanese artwork.

Aside from Hokusai’s contribution, the other four shirts are all styled after paintings from Hiroshige, starting with Rough Sea at Naruto in Awa Province, part of his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces series, which was painted in 1855 and depicts the whirlpools off the eastern coast of present-day Tokushima Prefecture, which still captivate travelers here in our time.

The seas are still dramatically wild in Hiroshige’s View of Mt. Fuji form Satta Point in Suruga Bay (1855), equating to modern-day Aichi Prefecture and taken from his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

▼ There’s even a splash of sea foam on the chest.

Before Tokyo was called Tokyo, it was known as Edo, but even then it was such a vibrant city that Hiroshige found sufficient inspiration for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, one of which is Nihonbashi: Clearing After Snow (1856) showing the arched bridge which served as a major thoroughfare for residents of the capital-to-be.

And last, we have Hiroshige’s The End of the Tokaido, Arriving at Kyoto, the final painting in his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido which chronicles his journey along the highway that connected Edo and Kyoto.

▼ The painting shows how Kyoto’s Sanjo Ohashi bridge appeared circa 1834.

Though it won’t be short-sleeved T-shirt weather in Japan for a while, the entire lineup is available now, priced at 1,990 yen (US$13) each, and can be ordered through the Uniqlo online store here.

Source: Uniqlo
Top image: Uniqlo
Insert images: Uniqlo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!