One day when they were in college, Ara Mahar volunteered to help at an international fashion show. They were president of their school’s Japanese culture club and excited to contribute to the event, which would expose people to the cultures not only of Japan, but of other countries from around the world.
It sounded like fun, they thought. It would certainly be an interesting way to spend an evening. They had no idea it would change their life.
Ara had never had an opportunity to look closely at a kimono, so when they finally got the chance backstage at the fashion show, “it was 100 percent love at first sight,” they say. “I had never seen anything more beautiful.”
And it wasn’t only the kimono itself that arrested their attention. They were also intrigued by the role of the kimono dresser helping the model prepare for the event. They didn’t know people still wore kimono, much less that “professional kimono dresser” was a job someone could have.
Fast forward to 2025. Ara, now an MRI technician in the Martinos Center’s Laboratories for Computational Neuroimaging, is a certified kimono dresser themself, as well as a teacher and a lively proponent of what they playfully call the “kimono cult.” They love everything about the tradition, they say — and they want you to know that you might, too.
What Exactly Is Kimono?
Like Ara in their pre-fashion show days, many people associate kimono with a bygone era, from long before the onslaught of modernity. The fact is, though, this particular fashion never actually went away.
“Kimono literally means thing to wear,” Ara says. “It refers to a whole category of Japanese clothing, everything from exercise wear to wedding outfits.” Accordingly, people across Japan still often don kimono. Quite a few cultural pursuits still require it: martial arts such as kendo and kyudo; sumo and many other sports; the performance of traditional music; tea ceremonies; and more. And then there are major life events. People still wear kimono for weddings, high school graduations, and other ceremonies marking major life events.
What has changed, Ara says, is that, “nowadays, in modern Japan, most people do not know how to wear kimono.” The everyday practice of it has fallen out of style. This is where the professional dresser enters the picture.
The Long Road of a Kimono Dresser
Within days of the fateful fashion show, a smitten Ara had found their way to a nearby Japanese antique store and bought a kimono of their own. When they got home, they sat down in front of their computer and started googling “How to wear a kimono” and scouring YouTube for the rare instructional video presented in English. Progress was slow at first, but they were determined. Over time, they grew more skilled and more confident.
After college, they spent two years teaching English in Japan. They took lessons during this time, taking advantage of a free opportunity they had stumbled across. Later, they returned to Japan for a two-week period of even more intensive study.
Their training, they say, was “the most wonderful experience of my life. The kimono world has a reputation as harsh and unwelcoming. But when you actually go to the schools and you’re dedicated to learning, they’re very supportive.”
Early this year, Ara reached another important milestone when they received their second-level certification, which allows them to perform some of the more complicated dressings.
What do these include? Because kimono encompasses clothing for so many different occasions, Ara says, “some of it is manageable, some of it is pretty wild.” The latter is especially the case with more formal kimono for women, where everything needs to be just right, from the padding used to create the necessary tubular body shape to the under-kimono and its collars, from the placement of the kimono itself — with no wrinkles or unwanted folds — to the intricate knots on the sash.
Kimono can serve for any occasion
What Do Kimono and Biomedical Imaging Have in Common?
MRI researcher and professional kimono dresser may sound like entirely unrelated pursuits, but this isn’t necessarily the case. “For me, the connection is pretty clear,” Ara says. “They’re both extremely difficult, and I love difficult things. I love things where it feels like you can learn forever.”
In both pursuits, you start with a problem, and you need to bring all your training and all your creativity to bear in solving the problem. In the case of kimono, you begin with a person with a unique body shape, and you need to find a way for the kimono to look and act the same on that person as it does on everybody else.
“It’s literally a scientific problem,” they say. “The only real difference is kimono is not an intrinsic truth of the universe.”
One of Ara’s greatest thrills is cultivating the same love of kimono in others that they have for the tradition themself. They started a Boston-based branch of a kimono Meetup group — and have attended its international summit — and teach at the Boston Kimono Academy.
Even more broadly, they want to spread the message that, with a mindset of respect, a foundation of knowledge, and a little bit of practice, anyone can learn to wear kimono and incorporate it into their everyday lives. “I’m trying to be on the Western Front of this,” they say. “There’s so much that kimono can give you. For me, it has shaped who I am and how I behave in such dramatic ways. I want people to understand that they too can wear kimono, and that they can wear it as regular clothes. It doesn’t have to be your wedding outfit only.”