Hunting Wear at the Heian Court, Vestment at the Shrine

The kariginu began as informal outdoor wear among Heian period court nobles, its name literally meaning hunting robe, cut with wide open sleeves attached only at the shoulder so a wearer could move freely on horseback. As the elaborate multilayer court dress of the Heian aristocracy fell out of daily use, several of its garments were carried forward into Shinto priestly vestment rather than discarded, and the kariginu became one of the standard everyday vestments of Shinto priests for rites and festivals that fall short of the most formal state occasions. The transition preserved the cut essentially unchanged; what changed was the setting, from a nobleman riding to hunt to a priest presiding at a shrine.

Hardacre's history of Shinto traces this general pattern, in which the modern priesthood's wardrobe is substantially a fossilized slice of Heian secular fashion rather than a vestment tradition invented for religious use from the outset, a point that distinguishes Shinto vestment history from traditions where clergy dress was designed as such from the beginning. The garment survives today largely because Shinto formalised its priesthood in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by codifying existing shrine custom rather than by designing a wholly new wardrobe, so continuity with Heian dress was preserved almost by default.