Despite its striking curved helmet crest of black-lacquered wood, this armor demonstrates a trend toward more sober decoration. Turning from what had been a highly decorative style to a more solidly practical model, the later Edo period armors in the Hosokawa collection reflect the troubled times at the end of the long feudal era, when the shogunate came to an end. Dark blue was preferred; excessive ornament was avoided.

This suit of “Sansai-style” armor, worn by the fourteenth-generation family head, Hosokawa Morihisa (1839–1893), follows a style adapted by his ancestor Hosokawa Sansai more than two hundred years earlier (cat. no. 23).