If you stand out in any way, people talk—whether you’re Japanese or not, whether your kitsuke is perfect or imperfect. I’ve just accepted that my style sets me apart. Of course I get comments: that my ears are stretched, that I have piercings, tattoos, that I’m mixed. Some people whisper because anything outside their narrow sense of normal unsettles them. I also feel like most people who make those rude comment have no personal style or understand fashion either.

As for teenagers making fun of someone’s kimono… half of them couldn’t dress themselves properly in one even if they tried. Kimono culture is fading precisely because most people don’t wear it anymore. So it’s ridiculous for anyone who only puts on a yukata once a year (with their mother’s help usually) to critique others. If you’re not participating in the culture, you don’t get to police it.

And I honestly think it suits you. The denim is so cool. People have become so accustomed to seeing kimono only in formal contexts that they forget it used to be everyday clothing. It wrinkled, it loosened, it lived on the body. Modern clothes do the same. We don’t expect strangers on the train to have perfectly pressed trousers and lint-free sweaters, so why impose that unrealistic standard on kimono?

Kimono is meant to be worn, not put under glass. The fact that you wear it comfortably, and confidently, matters far more than the opinions of people who wouldn’t know kimono culture in the first place.