Gold couching: one thread decorates, another secures

The maker winds the heavier decorative thread onto a wooden koma spool, lays it along the design and fastens it with a separate, finer thread. Small securing stitches cross over the decorative thread and pass through the cloth beside it. In this surface-couching method, the heavier thread lies on top of the fabric; underside couching uses a different stitch structure.

Koma embroidery worked with gold thread is called kin-koma-nui; silver thread gives gin-koma-nui. A metallic thread may be made from foil-coated paper wound around a core. In couching, that thread is laid on the cloth and secured by stitches, rather than woven into the fabric, painted on it or applied as loose foil.

Changing users and settings

Koma couching belongs to a broader embroidery tradition. The Kyoto Dyeing and Weaving Cultural Association traces embroidery through Heian elite and gagaku clothing, Momoyama Noh costumes and Edo townspeople’s garments. Its users and settings expanded over time; the use of a particular couching stitch still requires evidence from individual objects.

Gold lettering on an eighteenth-century kosode

An eighteenth-century kosode in Kyoto National Museum combines chrysanthemums, flowing water and Chinese characters on white figured satin. The characters across its upper half are worked in couched gold thread. Here the technique forms written characters as part of a garment’s decoration. The lettering comes from a poem on chrysanthemums by Sugawara no Fumitoki, included in the Wakan roeishu anthology. Large gold characters across the upper garment relate to the chrysanthemums spread over the fabric and the water pattern below. The complete garment reveals this arrangement; close examination of the stitching answers a different question about how the threads are attached.

Dating the samples

A 2022 study compared nine fragments attributed to the Meiji period with five Edo-period samples, using textile structure, dyes and metal analysis.

Evidence from front and back

All five Edo examples used couched twisted metallic thread. In sample 10, the face shows the decorative thread while the reverse reveals the separate securing stitches. All nine Meiji samples contained flat strips of foil-coated paper; four also used twisted thread, and the metallic threads passed through the fabric in different stitch arrangements. Looking at both sides therefore distinguishes methods that a golden surface alone cannot identify. These fourteen fragments document variation, rather than a rule for all textiles of either period.

Kyoto’s embroidery industry, within which couching was practised, faced a changing market in the Meiji period. The decline of daimyo households and the weakening of temples during anti-Buddhist campaigns reduced established patronage. As the Ritsumeikan University Art Research Center’s exhibition explains, embroiderers sought overseas buyers and expanded into embroidered pictures, screens and wall hangings suited to Western interiors. This was an industry-wide shift, not evidence that every export piece used gold couching.