Thirty-two Appearances of Fashion

"Thirty-Two Appearances of Fashion" is the English title under which museum catalogues sometimes record sheets from Yoshitoshi's celebrated bijin-ga series Fuzoku sanjuniso, more commonly rendered as "Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners" or "Thirty-Two Aspects of Women." The series was published in 1888 by Tsunashima Kamekichi in oban tate-e format and comprises thirty-two single-figure portraits of women of different social classes and historical periods, each identified by a brief poetic descriptor in a cartouche at the upper right that suggests the attitude or sensation registered by the figure: "looking warm," "looking cool," "looking lonely," "looking pleasant" and so on. The figures range across roughly a century of female types, from courtesans of the late Edo period to mothers, geisha, country wives and contemporary Meiji women, providing a panoramic survey of bijin-ga subjects through the lens of late nineteenth-century historicism. The series is one of the most consistently admired works of Yoshitoshi's late period, both for the psychological precision of the portraits and for the carefully controlled palette in which restrained reds, indigos and greys are set against the largely unprinted ground of the paper; Stevenson and other cataloguers single it out as one of the artist's central late statements alongside the "Twenty-Four Hours" bijin-ga cycles. Sheets from the series are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Tokyo National Museum, the Edo-Tokyo Museum and most other major Yoshitoshi collections, and the Fuzoku sanjuniso is widely regarded as one of the last major statements of the ukiyo-e bijin-ga tradition before its succession by the shin hanga revival of the early twentieth century.

The Thirty-two Appearances of Fashion series contains 1 prints, created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

The Thirty-two Appearances of Fashion series was created by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年).