About six months ago Chinami Mori, an Osaka weaver, started using her 93 year-old grandmother Emiko as a model for the psychedelic freestyle scarves she sells at market stalls and by (Japan-only) mail order. Since then Grandma Emiko — dressed in a psychedelic clash of cartoon and ethnic styles — has become a regular feature on Chinami’s Instagram, attracting thousands of new followers. On Christmas Eve the Instagram blog profiled Chinami, who explained that she uses a technique called Saori. “There are no rules,” she said. “I can weave as freely and as colourfully as I want.” Saori technique is based on the idea that anything goes and what’s important is heart. It was invented by Misao Jo, also from Osaka, who makes Emiko look like a teenager: she’s 102. Saori is meant to be therapeutic and enhance the “slow life”: “Having arrived at a materialistic culture,” explains tiny, frail Misao Jo, “we now seek a peaceful and more humane way to live.”
How great is this project — with its touches of Candy Decora, Boredoms-style psychedelia, ethnic folk costume, and Tibor Kalman-esque (un)Fashion — as a piece of art direction, photography and fashion? It singlehandedly justifies both Instagram and Osaka. The coverage hasn’t specified exactly where Chinami Mori is based, except that it’s “outside Osaka”, but the bucolic photos on her Instagram — as well as her funky acid-hippy sensibility — suggest strongly to me that she lives up on Mount Ikoma, the eastern mountain dividing Osaka from Nara. Home to various ex-Boredoms, hippies and liberal humanists, the Mount Ikoma scene was covered in an early edition of local music magazine IN/SECTS.