“A Girl Thing VI” Flip-Flops

Description

“A Girl Thing”

Make a U-turn and ‘Flip-Flop’ to ‘A Girl Thing’! Seven ‘Beautiful Women’ or ‘Bijin’ as they say in Japanese, are strolling with their umbrella’s on their Geita: the traditional wooden variant of flip-flops. The Bijin prints on our flip-flops are based on Japanese woodblock prints of a long past era called Ukiyo-e. Go with the flow as those girls did and add an extra feminine vibe to your life.

Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art during the “Edo-era”; a period from 1603 til 1868 when the Tokugawa shogunate was in power and had its seat in Edo – nowadays Tokyo. The art contains mostly woodblock prints and paintings and became very popular in the European art world at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time there was a transition from the “Edo-Era” to the “Meiji-Era” in which Japan opened up to the West and modernized. Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color, outline, realistic rendering and innovative asymmetrical compositions. “Japonism” had influence on impressionism and Jugendstil. Van Gogh had a huge collection of Ukiyo-e pictures.

Edo’s rapid economic growth gave the lower merchant class the option to indulge in the entertainments of kabuki theater, geisha, and courtesans of the sole licensed red-light district, the “Yoshiwara”. Originally Ukiyo is a combination of uki – which means sadness- and yo – means life. It reflects the Buddhist concept of life, involving a cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. However, during the early Edo period, another ideograph similarly pronounced as uki came into usage, which means “to float”. So, while one still can see the Ukiyo philosophy as “going with the flow in a floating world”, for many it evoked through the years an imagined universe of wit, stylishness, and extravagance, which the connotations of naughtiness, hedonism, and transgression. Ukiyo-e (the “e” stands for “picture”) depicted female beauties (bijin) in their daily life: they brush their hair, make themselves beautiful, walk, think, etc. Other subjects are kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, but also scenes from history, folk tales, travel scenes, landscapes, flora, fauna, and erotica (shunga).

Umbrella’s And Beauties
A second series Ukiyo-e prints is a selection of ‘Beauties and Umbrellas” made by different artists from different era’s.
Portraits we used are:
1. Beauty with Umbrella. Utagawa Fusatane. Active (1854 – 1889) during the tumultuous transition from the Edo period to the Meiji period (modernisation of Japan).
2. Lady with Umbrella. Utagawa Toyokuni II (alias Toyoshige ) (1777–1835)
3. Umbrella. Suzuki Kason (1860-1919)
4. Woman in Rain with Umbrella. Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769–1825)
5. Beauty with Umbrella. Utagawa Kunisada (1786 -1865)
6. Untitled. Toyohara Chikanobu (1838–1912) . Chikanobu was a leading woodblock print artist of the Meiji Period.
7. A Contemporary Parody on the kabuki play “Komachi Prays for Rain”. Utagawa Toyokuni (1769-1825)

• The original kabuki play was based on the legend of Ono no Komachi, the beautiful poetess of the ninth century. She put a card on which she had written a poem into a miniature boat and released it into a pond to pray for rain at the imperial garden. Thanks to the power of her poetry, the rain started and continued for three days.

.: 100% Rubber sole
.: 100% Polyester jersey sole cover
.: Textured black thong strap
.: Runs bigger than usual