Capitol Hill's Lifelong Thrift Store is a gorgeously wide-open space with giant windows and sunlight everywhere and oddities larding the walls. Like the gigantic reindeer head formed from an arrangement of empty Shasta cans. Once upon a time, this creature was a window display for a Barneys, a Lifelong employee says. And hovering behind the register is a poster of Prince. He wears a frothy white blouse; it spills deliciously open.

There's also a hanging kimono. It centers the back area and is severely lovely in a way that seems to take up the whole room: The print is an intricate tapestry-floral landscape with delicate birds gazing out. Somebody built this kimono out of wrapping paper and masking tape, maybe to cut costs. This also lightens the maintenance rituals, which tend to be meticulous and prolonged. To launder a traditional kimono, for instance, it must be taken fully apart before washing, then restitched after.

Kimono silk is steeply luxurious, and the "patterns seem to have a horror of cutting into the fabric," writes Liza Dalby in Kimono: Fashioning Culture. The pieces make a grid of interlocking rectangular panels, eliminating waste, and not even the excess cloth is trimmed (it gets folded into seams). This upends Western pattern-making standards—with scraps accruing from weird forms, organically puddling out, impossible to link together. While kimonos enwrap their wearer's body, and stack into tidy squares for storage, our standard garments are "intricately shaped, stiffened, and molded [to] represent a sort of hollow casting of their owner," writes Bernard Rudofsky in The Kimono Mind. "Between airings they hang like human effigies from the gallows of our clothes closets."

Kimonos establish their own type of rigidness; they're just less obvious about it. To wear one properly, a woman begins by transforming her body, evening her torso's curves into a cylinder. She binds her breasts, flattening them. She pads an hourglass waist away, using towels and gauze, or forms square shoulders into slopes. A network of ties and sashes holds everything together. They rest in particular spots with particular knots, and dressers cinch these tight enough to "stagger" the wearer, writes Liza. The obi sash brings the outfit's most relentless fit, one that "modern young ladies are allegedly unable to tolerate."

Modern young men can wear kimonos and obis, too. The styles are different, and their bodies are far less encased—though for everyone, the robes overlap in the same direction. In Western wear, the crossover corresponds to gender. In Japan, it indicates whether you're dead: Only a corpse's kimono robes are positioned right over left.

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