A samurai helmet in profile with a tall crescent crest, a face mask with bared teeth and red lacquered armour plates, behind it a red moon and a maple leaf at the collar. The back shows the same warrior from the other side, katana drawn across.
Product description
The Samurai Kabuto Helmet T-shirt is a portrait without a face. What you see is the armour: a kabuto with a tall, crescent-shaped crest whose two golden-brown horns reach far beyond the red moon. Below it the face mask, the menpo, with a furrowed brow, sunken eyes and a set of teeth showing between the lips. At the neck follow the lamellar plates of the neck guard, lacquered red, with golden edges and dark lacing. A single red maple leaf hangs at the collar, as if it had just fallen from the tree and come to rest on the armour.
The whole thing is drawn like a Japanese woodblock print. The lines are carved rather than painted, the surfaces carry the fine grain that remains from the printing block, and the colours sit flat next to each other: the black of the helmet, the red of the lacquered plates, a muted gold for the crest and edges, a touch of green in the skin of the mask. Behind the head stands the moon as a large red disc with a pale, mottled surface. It fills the space between the horns and gives the profile an aura that makes the motif restless up close and calm from a distance.
The back shows the warrior once more, but not as a copy. Here he is half turned away, you see the other side of the helmet, the shoulder plates and an arm that has drawn the katana across the body. The blade carries a red reflection, two more maple leaves fall on the left side, and the body dissolves into brush strokes on the right, so that the warrior seems to step out of the fabric. Front and back thus tell two views of the same figure: on the front the mask that stares at you, on the back the moment the sword comes.
The Samurai Kabuto Helmet T-shirt lives on detail. The lacing of the armour is drawn row by row, the rivets on the helmet are set one by one, the teeth of the mask are uneven like those of old Noh masks. And yet the motif reads instantly from a few metres away: a dark horned helmet before a red disc. The red of the moon and the red of the armour are deliberately the same shade, which makes the warrior look as if he had been cut out of the moon.
The motif is printed on a cotton shirt in three base colours. Natural is an unbleached cream tone on which the woodblock print lies as if on old paper. Sky is a light blue that gives the red a cool counterpart. Gold is a warm mustard yellow that picks up the crest of the helmet and makes the motif look strongest. On all three colours the profile sits on the front at chest height, the warrior with the katana on the upper back. The sleeves stay plain.
The Samurai Kabuto Helmet T-shirt is meant for people who love armour, masks and the ukiyo-e style: visitors of Japan exhibitions, collectors of woodblock prints, kendoka, role players and everyone who wants to wear a motif with edges and character. As a gift it suits someone who keeps a book about the Sengoku period on the shelf or a miniature suit of armour on the desk. The motif shows armour, no face, no wound, no blood, only the mask, the helmet, the leaf and the moon.
