Colleen Kimura’s Maximalist Vision of the Pacific

The bold designs under her brand Tutuvi are being celebrated by a new generation of local fashion acolytes.

Images by Brandyn Liu and Cole Turner

Despite the boldly unconventional motifs that run through the textiles designer Colleen Kimura’s work — from the bones of the humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa to a wilting torch ginger far past its prime — it’s her colors that hit you first: a dreamy periwinkle that fizzles against the shock of citron-yellow or a brown rust billowing across an earthy expanse of moss. These are color combinations that have become recognizable, by a certain fashionable set in Hawai‘i, as “so Tutuvi,” a reference to the small batch collection of screen printed fabrics, furnishings, and aloha wear that Kimura’s been producing since 1980.  

Her colors evoke responses typically associated with the pleasures of food. “I could eat this color,” exclaimed one friend, after Kimura showed him a deep aquamarine-turquoise she was working with. “That looks like the most intense shoyu teriyaki,” marveled another. The fashion designer Rumi Murakami, whose multiple collaborations with Kimura are titled “Umami,” describes her use of color as “juicy” and “delicious.” “There are certain colors that she uses and only she uses,” Murakami says.

“Just like the imagery, you’re looking for uncommon color combinations, a surprise,” says Kimura, 77, sitting in the living room of her Moanalua Gardens home, the front door cracked to let out the smoke of a mosquito punk. “You want to get that feeling, ‘Look at this.’”

When I spoke to Kimura in June 2024, the soft-spoken and self-effacing artist seemed dumbfounded by the recent attention her work was receiving, which was the subject of a 2024 art show and retrospective project organized by Puʻuhonua Society and Tropic Editions. Despite a decades-old devoted following, which included the late activist Haunani-Kay Trask, who once gave Kimura a navy dress to screenprint, Kimura says her vision has long felt out of step with prevailing tastes, her exuberant celebration of the Pacific either too loud or weird or expensive, given her time-consuming process. 

But throughout the decades she persisted the only way she knew how, with a dogged and unwavering belief in her artistic vision. “I guess that was always the first thing: What makes sense to me. What looks good to me. What resonates with me and, oh, yeah, I hope other people think the same way too,” she says. “It took years, but I kept putting it out there and eventually it became somewhat familiar enough to people.”

Kimura grew up in Kapahulu, in an apartment complex on Date Street. Her mother was a nurse but constantly made things on her time off, from knitting and ceramics to furniture she constructed out of old apple crates. She’d also cut and sew clothing for herself and Kimura, who recalls being struck by her mother’s unusual fashion choices. “She was a very small woman,” says Kimura, “and whereas the thinking of the time was you’re small, you wear small prints, she didn’t care.” 

Initially, Kimura felt reluctant about standing out. She still remembers showing up to middle school one day dressed in a flamboyant African-inspired print her mom bought her and thinking, Wow, is this okay? But she eventually came around to appreciating her mother’s left field fashion. “I thought it was neat that she was an odd person in a neighborhood where everybody else had sort of normal taste,” she says.

After graduating from Kaimukī High School, Kimura studied art at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she took to screen printing. She was drawn to the freedom of the medium, which allowed for a seemingly endless assortment of images and colors limited solely by her imagination. In 1972, a few years after graduating, she opened Kimura’s in an industrial space on King Street. It started as a studio for her and a few friends experimenting with a labor-intensive form of Indonesian printing known as batik, producing textiles which they would sell to local fashion companies like Baba Kea. Over time, the space took on different forms, functioning as a gallery and a store for her and her friends’ work. 

Kimura studied art at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she took to screen printing. She was drawn to the freedom of the medium, which allowed for a seemingly endless assortment of images and colors limited solely by her imagination.

Six years into Kimura’s, in her mid-twenties, Kimura says she found herself “in some strange middle ground.” She took stock of her life, her “nice middle-class family” and the small but tight-knit art community she had cultivated since graduation, and felt a sharp desire to experience something new. “I think I was curious to get really close to people who were in a completely different situation than me,” she says. She signed up as a volunteer for the Peace Corps and was soon stationed in Fiji, where she taught local women how to market their handcrafted wares. While she was away, she leased Kimura’s to Gary Fujimoto of Cane Haul Road, another long-standing local clothing brand.

It wasn’t until she was on the flight back to Hawaiʻi more than two years later that she realized she had no idea what she wanted to do upon her return. “It was a sudden fear, like, I have to start all over again,” she recalls, gasping. Back home, her mind was flooded with memories of Fiji. During one bout of longing she picked up her Fijian dictionary and landed on the word “tutuvi”: to wrap yourself. It reminded her of the lavalava, or wraps, she wore all over Fiji, during a time when pants were considered an unacceptable garment for women. “I thought the meaning was perfect because that’s what I would be printing,” she says. “That’s the simplest garment, a length of the fabric.”

In 1980, she transitioned Kimura’s into Tutuvi. Though inspired by her time abroad, she knew she wanted to create images that reflected the natural beauty of her home. For her debut collection she landed on five motifs: a squid, pufferfish, lauaʻe fern, torch ginger, and banana leaf. She admits that she initially approached her imagery as purely decorative, focusing on colors and shapes she now describes as “generically tropical.” But over time, she came to understand that her alluring color palettes could function as a kind of Trojan horse, shepherding in images, stories, and references to Native Hawaiian folklore that reflected the richness of local culture.

“It’s an attempt to find imagery that people haven’t seen before,” she says, emphasizing that she thinks like a printmaker first and a designer second, meticulously cutting her garments to best frame her prints. “It’s like, ‘Consider this. This is part of the whole history.’” 

It’s an attempt to find imagery that people haven’t seen before. It’s like, ‘Consider this. This is part of the whole history.’

Colleen Kimura

Kimura closed her store on King Street in 2013, after the building was demolished, and has been operating the business out of her home ever since. Still, surprising opportunities keep coming her way, from a sprawling art show in 2017 celebrating the renovation of Pearlridge Center to designing shirts for Robert Cazimero’s Hālau Nā Kamalei O Līlīlehua, when it took home the grand prize at the 2015 Merrie Monarch Festival.

More recently, in March 2024, Puʻuhonua Society and Tropic Editions presented an exhibition at Arts & Letters called “Tutuvi Newsprint,” which transformed remnants of Kimura’s screen printing process — colorful layers of overprints that she would catch on pages from the daily newspaper, to minimize the mess — into works of art. In August, her work was the focus of a retrospective fashion show in which four designers — past collaborators Murakami and Aiala Rickard along with Marika Emi and Reise Kochi — cast Kimura’s prints in a new light, designing garments that were styled alongside Kimura’s previous work with Toqa and Bete Muʻu, and a cape by artist Taiji Terasaki. After sifting through her archive, organized across large industrial shelves in her living room, they each worked with Kimura to interpret old motifs into new colorways and materials. Kochi described the process as “joyful,” highlighting the intentionality behind Kimura’s output, which offers a slower but more thoughtful alternative to the grinding pace of the fashion industry. “Tutuvi is a reminder that quantity does not define quality or success,” he says. 

“Her prints and her aura are constantly reminding me to connect with the nature around me and have fun with the process,” says Rickard, who worked with Kimura on a swimwear collection for the 2022 Hawaiʻi Triennial. “She is so completely kind and thoughtful in her design. She takes into account all the little details in her prints, each stroke and negative space counts.”

The retrospective comes at a time when interest in the nuts and bolts process of garment manufacturing is experiencing a resurgence among younger people, says Emi, founder of Tropic Editions. In introducing a new generation to Kimura’s work, Emi hopes to spotlight Hawaiʻi’s rich legacy of fashion production, and the unique role Kimura’s played in that history. In addition to the show, the retrospective will include a print publication by Tropic Editions and a film that further reflects on Kimura’s oeuvre. (Both are slated for release in early 2025.) “Colleen’s approach to making garments has always been as an artist, not as a designer,” says Emi. “I think Tutuvi represents a crossover between art and fashion here in Hawaiʻi that is lost on the general public.”   

As much as she’s drawn to the loudness of Kimura’s prints, Murakami says she’s equally inspired by her ability to hone in on life’s quieter details. She points to Kimura’s home as an example. A few years ago, Kimura came home one night during a supermoon and noticed the stark shadow of her plumeria tree stretching across her front steps. Mesmerized, she fetched a piece of chalk and quickly sketched the tree’s leafy outline, before filling in the space with mauve paint a week later. 

“I think this reflects the way that she lives,” says Murakami. “She’s not looking out there for her inspiration. She’s inspired by stuff that’s right in front of her.”

Kimura’s greatest thrill remains happening upon someone wearing Tutuvi. She can usually spot her garments from a block away, and though she never approaches the person, she sees it as an exchange.  

“It’s kind of a language between me and these people that buy it and wear it. And it’s not a spoken language,” she says. “It’s something that you can’t quite name, but it’s a real thing that runs through the prints.”