In the 1920s and 1930s, a new kind of urban culture was taking hold across Japan. Western-style cafes, bars, cocktail lounges and dance halls were opening in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe. The customers who filled them, the so-called moga and mobo, Japan's modern girls and boys, expected a certain look. Bold, fashionable, cosmopolitan. And the businesses that wanted their attention needed to advertise.

The matchbox was one of the primary vehicles for that advertising. Given away free, slipped across bars, left on tables - a branded matchbox was a small but persistent presence in the pockets of exactly the people you were trying to reach. Designing the label was a serious commercial exercise. It had to be striking at miniature scale, memorable in an instant, and expressive of a particular atmosphere. The constraint produced something remarkable: a body of graphic work that feels, a century later, like it was made for the wall.

Japan's match industry was by this point a genuine global force - one of the three largest match-producing nations in the world alongside Sweden and the United States, with the Kobe and Himeji regions at its centre. Label printing had evolved from early woodblock methods through to sophisticated lithographic processes capable of laying down four to seven colors in careful sequence. The labels that came out of this system were not rough or artless. They were precise, considered, and often beautiful.

Most were discarded the moment the last match was struck. That is what makes the ones that survive: the cafe scenes, the bar interiors, the cats and cranes and cocktail glasses so striking to encounter now.

We search out surviving reference material for these designs, restore them digitally to bring back colour and detail, and print them as wall art. The designs in this collection exist nowhere else in this form.