Kasuri is thus a textile that appears to have been rubbed. Since the edges of the pattern do not align, they take on the nature of an odd number rather than an even number. Without this rubbing or smudging, kasuri could never have been. However, since it is precisely this misalignment and blurry effect that is the source of kasuri’s beauty, we are presented with an interesting problem. I will call this problem ‘the beauty of odd numbers’.
I was in a hotel room a few years ago and I woke up in the early hours and glanced at the digital clock radio. It displayed the time using six digits HH:MM:SS
Just at the moment I glanced it flicked over to 04:04:04. It occurred to me that, using calculator word logic, this would read ‘ho ho ho’ if viewed upside down. That year I produced a Christmas card with those digits on the front and ‘Christmastime’ printed upside down as the message on the inside. In the absence of any further explanation, absolutely nobody understood the card.
Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that "style consists in distinction of form," and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had "become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs," and he found it "necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand."