Illustrated Book of the Current Fashion

Illustrated Book of the Current Fashion, dated 1802, is a woodblock-printed picture book by Utagawa Toyokuni in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The volume belongs to the rich Edo ukiyo-e tradition of fashion-themed ehon, picture books that presented current robes, hairstyles, accessories, and figural types of fashionable Edo women in carefully arranged pages, functioning at once as fashion plate, design source, and entertainment for the urban book market. By 1802 Toyokuni was firmly established as the leading designer of his generation and the founding master of the Utagawa school's commercial dominance; ehon of this kind worked alongside his single-sheet yakusha-e and bijin-ga to broaden the studio's reach across formats. The bound book form allowed for sustained sequences in which a designer could show robes from front, back, and three-quarter views, articulate the figural conventions of the period's bijin-ga, and embed his designs within textual descriptions of seasonal pleasures and Yoshiwara mores. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the volume as part of its substantial holdings of Utagawa-school printed material and documents it with the English title alone. As a documented 1802 design, the book provides important evidence of how Toyokuni's studio engaged with the broader print and book trade of Edo and how the visual idiom that defined his yakusha-e was projected outward into the everyday print culture of the city.