Are kabuki costumes ordered from Kyoto?

What sustains the splendour of kabuki costume is the craft of weaving and embroidery — heavy weaves worked with gold thread, needlework in relief. These are advanced hand skills that cannot exist without the accumulated knowledge of a textile district, and in Japan such knowledge has gathered above all in Kyoto's Nishijin and its neighbours. The tie between kabuki costume and Kyoto is, accordingly, said to be deep.

But the relation is not a single line of ordering from Kyoto. The actual flow runs like this. When a staging is fixed, the specialist company that manages the wardrobe — Shochiku Costume among them — considers what that role in that play requires. If existing garments suffice, they are altered and used. If something must be newly made, cloth is commissioned and embroidery commissioned, and it is these commissions that go to workshops in Kyoto and elsewhere.

Beyond that, the specialist company handles tailoring, storage, dressing and management through the run, and restoration afterwards. The Kyoto workshops carry an important stage of the work, in other words, but a stage within a larger whole. The skills of a textile district and the management system that sustains an engagement mesh together, and that is how costume keeps up with a bill that changes every month.