Sarasa Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf
Sarasa Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf Sarasa Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf Few textile prints carry the quiet authority of the sarasa. Rich in cultural memory and exquisitely suited to the drape of silk, the sarasa pattern has traveled across centuries and continents to arrive, still radiantly alive, at the modern wardrobe. When rendered on a silk scarf, it becomes something more than an accessory. It becomes a wearable history. The word sarasa derives from the Portuguese word "saraça," which itself traces to the Persian "sharaz" or the Sanskrit "sarasa," meaning elegant or beautiful. The design tradition began as Indian hand-painted and block-printed cotton cloth — what the West came to call chintz — that Portuguese and Dutch traders imported into Europe and Japan from the sixteenth century onward. In Japan, these imported fabrics were called sarasa, and the name stuck as Japanese craftspeople developed their own regional interpretations. The Kyoto, ...