Hat

Hat continues Saito Kaoru's recurring practice of letting an item of dress stand in for, or define, a female subject. The title points to a millinery form rather than the kanzashi or kasa of older bijin-ga conventions, locating the print in a contemporary register while preserving the underlying interest in feminine presentation that links Saito's work to the ukiyo-e tradition. The hat's brim, crown, and any band or trim offer mezzotint a graded set of tonal problems: rounded volumes, a hard outer edge against background black, and the softer edge where the hat meets hair or skin. Saito would have used the burnishing tool to lift these passages from the rocked plate while leaving the surrounding ground in full burr. The result is a print in which costume is not decoration applied to a figure but the principal carrier of the image's identity, a strategy that aligns Hat with his closely related studies of buttons, fans, and other isolated articles of dress.