Kawashima Textile Museum

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Items that define the attitude of Kawashima Selkon Textile to the task of creating greet visitors in the entrance hall

A tour that brings textiles to life

This museum belongs to Kawashima Selkon Textiles, a company founded in 1843 and renowned for fabulous textile art works that adorn the interiors of historical buildings both in Japan and overseas. The second head of the family business, Jimbei Kawashima, founded the forerunner of this collection in 1889, when he built an industrial museum (the first of its kind in Japan) to cater to the company’s textile R&D needs, which enabled the company to amass an historically valuable body of textile data and materials that was displayed along with new designs.
The collection now extends to 160,000 pieces – notably, including dyed textiles (such as ceremonial gowns and clothing in all sorts of fabrics) as well as a diverse range of test fabrics and conceptual sketches (copies, originals and roughs) used by interior designers to create interior décor. Pieces from this vast, eclectic collection are mainly related to textiles produced from Meiji Era.
Exhibits are displayed such as tsuzure tapestry, interior decorative textile and materials exhibited to expos around the world, rotated whenever necessary.