The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Momoyogusa SS27: A 1909 Pattern Book Art-Directs a 2027 Capsule
In 1909, Kyoto designer Kamisaka Sekka published Momoyogusa ("A World of Things"), three volumes of woodblock-printed patterns so flat and graphic they still look modern a century later.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on eight plates from the Cleveland Museum of Art's public-domain copy, keeping Sekka's flat colour fields, metallic accents and empty paper grounds.
Then I handed him a 2027 brief: a streetwear capsule. His winter river became a quilted puffer, his cranes climbed onto chunky trainers, his peonies bloomed on headphones, and his dancers came back in matching tracksuits.
A pattern book from 1909, working as a fashion house's design studio.
🙌
This is such a brilliant concept Shezaan! Taking Kamisaka Sekka's 1909 Momoyogusa and reimagining it as a 2027 capsule with Recraft V4 is genius. The woodblock patterns are timeless, and seeing them translated onto modern products like headphones is so well executed. Love the...
Thanks man ♥️
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Related posts
200 years ago, local artists painted the everyday people of the subcontinent: barbers, porters, chai wallas, knife sharpeners. Each one got a portrait, flat colours, a fancy border, total respect.
So I asked: what if those same painters time travelled to Lahore today?
I found their work in the Wellcome Collection’s public domain archive, trained a Recraft Style on it, and sent it to paint the new pesha of my city.
Same old painter, new Lahore. 😄
Love this. Giving chai wallas and porters that old portrait treatment again feels really respectful. The borders are beautiful.
Costumes Parisiens 2026: George Barbier's Paris fashion plates of 1913, dressed for the way we live now.
In 1913 George Barbier drew the latest Paris fashion for the Journal des Dames et des Modes: flat stencil colour, one elegant figure per plate, and a caption announcing the look, like "Robe d'intérieur" or "Manteau de théâtre". I found his Costumes Parisiens plates at the Rijksmuseum, where they are in the public domain, cropped ten of them down to the bare stencil and built a Recraft V4 Style from them. Costumes Parisiens 2026 keeps his poses and his captions and dresses them for how we actually live now: a silk blouse over pyjama trousers for the video call, a red delivery backpack worn over a fur-trimmed coat, a theatre coat embroidered with 99 unread badges, a necklace of charging cables, earbuds worn as pearl drops, a ring light carried like a parasol. Same magazine, a hundred and thirteen years later; only the accessories have changed.
I found Eugène Grasset’s 1896 La plante et ses applications ornementales, a pattern book of Art Nouveau plant studies, on the Public Domain Image Archive, sourced from the Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive. I used four of its plates as references to build a custom Recraft V4 Style called “Flora Urbana – Grasset Ornament”. The series, Flora Urbana: A Botanical Atlas of Modern Life, treats everyday technology as newly discovered species, each plate with a specimen above and abstracted ornament borders below. Earbuds become flower buds, a drone becomes a winged seed, a video call becomes a bed of blossoms, and an electric kettle becomes a snail. Grasset’s flat, lithographed look makes the modern objects feel like they belong in a Victorian herbarium.
