A Blockbuster Exhibition on Samurai Reveals How the Warriors Dressed the Part

For nearly 700 years, samurai were Japan’s social elite, skilled not only in combat but also in politics and the courtly arts. To equip these warriors in accordance with their status required an entire class of artisans, from the blacksmiths and leatherworkers who made their weapons and armor to the embroiderers who applied detailed designs to their coats and shoes. Samurai “clearly understood the functional requirements of armor,” Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, who with his wife, Ann, is the most important collector of samurai regalia outside Japan, said in a 2017 interview, “but the aesthetic was important, too. … No two armors are alike.” The scion of a prominent Swiss clan who were patrons of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Barbier-Mueller took his family legacy in a new direction, making his fortune in Texas real estate development and training his connoisseur’s eye on samurai accoutrements.

Today, the collection is permanently on view at a museum in Dallas, and for more than a decade a few dozen choice pieces have also been part of a traveling exhibition, which makes its next stop in a worldwide tour at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this month. The samurai officially hung up their helmets after Japan’s last shogun, or military ruler, fell in 1868, but “the way of the warrior” lives on in the artistry of their armorers. “It’s only natural,” wrote 20th-century novelist Eiji Yoshikawa, chronicler of his country’s feudal era, “that the craftsman who polishes the sword must also polish the swordsman’s spirit.” 

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Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.