Modern Designs for Combs and Tobacco Pipes (Imayo sekkin hinagata)

Modern Designs for Combs and Tobacco Pipes, known in Japanese as Imayō sekkin hinagata, is a pattern book by Katsushika Hokusai held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The volume gathers designs for two of the most personal accessories in Edo daily life: the combs that women used to dress their hair and the long-stemmed kiseru tobacco pipes carried by men and women alike. Each page presents motifs ranging from auspicious symbols and seasonal flora to landscape vignettes and abstract patterns, all scaled to the curving forms of these intimate objects. As a ukiyo-e print designer working at the intersection of fine art and the decorative trades, Hokusai gave craftsmen a portable resource that could be adapted into lacquer, ivory, metal, or bamboo. The book is a striking example of how Edo ukiyo-e influence reached well beyond single sheets and into the wardrobe, the smoking set, and the dressing table of urban consumers. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves Imayō sekkin hinagata within its broader holdings of Hokusai's illustrated books, where it documents the interconnection of print design and the applied arts in late Edo Japan. For modern viewers the album offers a rare look at the design pipeline that produced everyday objects, and it confirms Hokusai's standing as a designer whose imagination shaped both monumental landscape prints and the small but intensely personal objects of daily use.