About Naomi

Who Naomi is

Naomi Saito was born and raised in Tokyo, and she lives in the old wooden house she inherited from her grandmother. Her grandmother taught her to fold and store a kimono, to air clothes by the window, to mend instead of replace, and to feel mottainai, the shame of wasting something that is still good.

She spent most of her working life in the womenswear department of a large Tokyo department store, first on the shop floor and in the fitting rooms, later supervising a floor of everyday clothes for women of her mother's age. That work taught her to see fabric, proportion and movement on a real woman, not on a mannequin: a hem that cuts the leg in the wrong place, a collar too heavy for a small frame, a color that tires the face in winter light.

She left the store in her early fifties. Friends and former customers kept asking her what to keep and what to let go, and she started her English-language channel to bring the quiet Japanese way of dressing, fewer and better pieces worn with care, to everyday American wardrobes.

Work

Sales assistant, then floor supervisor in the womenswear department of a large Tokyo department store

Home

Her grandmother's old wooden house in Tokyo

Learned from

Her grandmother: folding, airing, mending, and caring for clothes so they last

Loves

Linen, cotton, wool and silk; indigo dyeing; small pearls; hydrangeas in June

What she is, and isn't

Naomi spent her career selling and fitting clothes. She is not a professional stylist, a fashion designer, a kimono teacher or a dressmaker, and the book never pretends otherwise. She never names the store she worked for or the women she dressed.

How the book is put together

• Your closet first. Every chapter starts with what you already own, and every idea ends with a test you can do at your own mirror.
• No brands, no shopping list. The book never tells you what to buy or where. It explains what to look for in a fabric, a cut and a length.
• Checked facts. Everything it says about the history of clothes, from indigo to mending, comes from real, published sources.
• Not professional advice. Nothing in the book is medical, diet or health advice.