Japanese Boro. Photo by Cynthia Shaver. Author’s collection.

I appraised a ‘boro’, a Japanese patched blue cotton textile and needed to do quite a bit of research to understand what the property was. Boro began in the late 1800’s in Northern Japan where the winters are quite cold and cotton could not be cultivated. The Japanese trade ships brought old cotton kimono, some sold as fabric scraps or torn into strips and sold wrapped in balls like yarn. I learned the expression ‘mottainai’, waste nothing, if you have enough fabric to wrap three grains of rice, then you need to save the fabric for patching and do not throw away.

Boro, by what has become a common definition, is a patched non-silk Japanese textile, literally rags sewn together Some are garments, some are blankets or the top of a duvet. If your clothes were sewn together rags, it showed how poor you were. Maybe you didn’t have to dress in rags but slept on them. Today, these are obsessively collected.

An interesting question is what makes one boro of higher value than another? Historically in Japan there were no standards, no traditions, so what was more valued? Is it better to have greater variation among the patches in colors, or less? What about many small patches or a few large patches?

While researching value characteristics of boro, I noticed large size pieces sell for higher prices than small pieces. For some dealers such as Shibui of New York, garments are valued higher than fabric. At SRI Threads of New York on the other hand, large fabric squares can be are valued higher than garments. A properly presented garment is stunning on the wall, yet the boro square can be explosive like many a Rothko canvas. It is important to understand when boro began, the purpose was to patch with the available recycled fabric. Choice of fabric was often limited to what was available. One could also place value on the number of different techniques exposed in the patches.

I have valued rectangular Japanese cotton fabric panels with patches, boro, that sold for hundreds of dollars, some for thousands. An example I found online was a large, 4’ square cloth of many indigo patches and was valued at $8,000.00 (eight thousand dollars). It had a density of patches in three areas, most of the patches two-inch squares. On top of some of the patches was extra stitching to assure the cloth would be sturdy. The patches displayed a variety of techniques used by the Japanese. There was shibori or tie day, and two different kinds of kasuri or ikat and several patches of plain hand dyed indigo cotton.

In the case of the particular boro textile, photograph attached, the design on the non-patched side is a repeat motif, a 24 petal chrysanthemum, made with a stencil and repeated every 6 cm. This dates the cloth to 1850’s when the size of the stencils and design was regulated. Only blue and white cloth was allowed and designs were strictly monitored. This fabric is part of a futon or duvet, patched as needed. This stenciled, katazome, cloth regardless of the patches on the other side has a value too. Both sides of this textile are pleasing to view, making it quite extraordinary.