Vested Interests : Kathryn Onano’s One-of-a-Kind Creations Fashioned From Vintage Kimonos Are More Than Accessories--They’re Art

On this secluded hillside in a remote section of Santa Barbara County, Kathryn Kezele Kamifuji Onano has found the ideal backdrop for weaving her Japanese heritage into wearable works of art.

She spends most of every day in a barn-turned-studio rummaging through bins of vintage kimonos to find the perfect pieces for her fashion collages. “I use the analogy of sifting through tons of fabric and smelling it and smelling Japan,” she says, soaking up the scent. “It’s like digging in the earth and finding my roots.”

Wearing blue jeans and roughing it on a 10-acre banana plantation is a big switch for Onano, who grew up in Los Angeles and spent the last 10 years living and working out of a Toluca Lake apartment. On a dining-room table converted into a makeshift cutting station, she formed a one-woman business.

Her label, Onano, now adorns vests and ties--each unusual for its beading, hand-painting, embroidery or ancestral markings--sold in such stores as I. Magnin, Neiman Marcus, Sami Dinar and Fred Segal.

The daughter of a Japanese mother and a Yugoslavian father, Onano, 38, says she identifies strongly with her Asian roots. “It’s an inner thing,” she says. Her fascination with the kimono--a long silk robe-like gown tied with an obi, or sash, and traditionally worn as an outer garment--began on childhood visits to Kyushu, in Japan.

“My grandmother made kimonos by hand, no sewing machines,” she recalls. “She even tried to teach me to make one when I was 8.”

But it wasn’t until 1977, while studying Asian languages and culture at Waseda University in Tokyo, that Onano began to collect kimonos. After returning to the States, she tinkered with the idea of doing more with the vintage fabrics and eventually fashioned them into then-trendy skinny ties. Friends encouraged Onano to make more of her new hobby, so, in her off time from a sales job at the boutique Charles Gallay, she made the rounds.

“Madonna Man (formerly on Rodeo Drive) was my first retail account, then I sold to Maxfield, and within three years the business was supporting me.”

But the venture did little more than pay Onano’s modest bills until 1991, when she met Terence Ford, a sometime actor and photographer, and younger brother of Harrison. “Kathryn is extremely creative and talented, but she’s not a businesswoman,” says Ford. He put his career on hold to market the label.

Among his first accomplishments was a key product placement: Harrison Ford wears an Onano vest under a black dinner jacket in the opening party scene of “The Fugitive.”

Onano remains at the creative helm, surrounded by 30-gallon containers in which she has stashed kimonos according to age or color. It sometimes takes months for her to match and cut strips of the delicate silk into the patterns that will be sewn into clothing by part-time workers. “The pieces that make up a kimono are only 14 inches wide, so I was limited as to what I could make with that much yardage,” she explains.

An avid thrift-store shopper, Onano plucked many of the kimonos, mostly circa 1920s to 1960s, for her early designs from local stores. Today, professional kimono “pickers” in the United States and Japan buy and ship fabrics to her. Onano refuses to cut or alter a flawless kimono. “It used to be considered sacrilegious to cut them,” she says.

Recent interest in kimonos as collectibles has driven up their price from $30 in the early 1980s to more than $300 today. As a result, an Onano tie may sell for as much as $65, men’s and women’s vests for $230 to $325.

Because she assembles her pieces like a collage, Onano considers herself more an artist than a designer.

“I’d almost compare it to painting a picture,” she says of her design process. “There is this blank canvas, which is the body of the vest, and from there I decide where to put the color.”

With expected sales of nearly $200,000 this year, Ford and Onano believe the company has grown enough. “There are only a certain number of vests that we can produce--usually 90 to 100 a week--without changing the quality,” he says.

Besides, Onano says she has finally achieved the ultimate lifestyle.

“As a child, I was often reminded by my mother that young Japanese women wear dresses and always act girlish. Now I’m out here in the wilderness hiking. And I have the time to become the true outdoors woman I’ve always wanted to be.”