In her latest incarnation, Madonna can be seen on the cover of last month's Harper's Bazaar. After 1998's preoccupation with Hindu spirituality - which led to the singer wearing saris and having her hands painted with henna - she has now moved further east for fresh inspiration. Her hair hangs long, straight and jet black, her face, where matt white skin contrasts with carmined lips, is reminiscent of a kabuki artist, and her clothes seem inspired by ceremonial kimonos. Inside the magazine, Madonna speaks of her preoccupation with Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden's unexpectedly best-selling novel which may soon be turned into a feature film.
How ironic - and yet inevitable - that it should take an American writer and a pop singer, together with a couple of European designers (Jean Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, both of whose latest collections are modelled by Madonna inside Harper's Bazaar) to make traditional Japanese style newly-fashionable.
Memoirs of a Geisha has been hugely popular not, as has been claimed, because it describes one woman's life within an alien culture, but because life and culture alike have been conveniently interpreted for a Western audience unwilling or unable to examine the original. The novel is a European model of story-telling, so by using this form Arthur Golden immediately weakens the sense of authenticity in his book.
A tale which is truly Japanese, meanwhile - such as the 11th-century Tale of Genji by the Lady Murasaki Shikibu - could never hope to find a large readership outside its own culture because the structure and style are so exclusively indigenous. Looking at the clothes worn by Madonna, it is clear Japan - along with its neighbour, China, from the traditional costumes of which elements have also been borrowed - is being treated simply as an exotic visual resource. Oriental details have been applied to Western clothes which retain their original character, even if this is sometimes lightly obscured. There is nothing unusual about this process.
In Europe, the east has always been viewed as an opportunity to exercise the creative imagination. During the Middle Ages, long before travellers from Italy and Portugal actually reached the Far East, an elaborate fantasy was constructed about a land called Cathay. Christopher Columbus, for example, imagined this was his destination when he sailed to the Americas and belief in Cathay was surrendered only reluctantly. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci was still inquiring for the place when he reached Beijing in 1601, even though he had spent close to two decades in the Chinese cities of Macao and Nanjing. Although the search for Cathay had to be abandoned, Europeans retained their hazy view of the east as a place of enchantment.
When efforts were made to incorporate elements of Chinese or Japanese design into western architecture and furniture, these were never more than superficial. The late 17th and 18th-century craze for chinoiserie was simply an earlier instance of Madonna's clothes; here again, minor decorative elements in what were perceived to be an oriental style were grafted onto western forms. The earliest known instance of chinoiserie was the Trianon de porcelaine construction for Louis XIV at Versailles in the 1670s; like so many of its later imitations, this now-lost building was devised for the entertainment of the king's mistress, thereby underlining the playfully frivolous nature of chinoiserie, which was simply rococo in a more exotic guise than usual. Similarly, the tea houses and pagodas which were erected in the ornamental gardens of the 18th century were classical buildings under a thin veneer of exoticism.
When orientalism returned to favour in the west during the 19th century, it had to compete with many other sources of inspiration; everything outside the immediate experience and therefore largely unfamiliar - whether imperial Rome or imperial China - was equally worthy of interest. In this respect, Puccini's Madama Butterfly could be considered a precursor of Memoirs of a Geisha. Butterfly's origins can be traced to a novel, Madame Chrysantheme, written by a French naval officer, Pierre Loti(the pseudonym of Julien Viaud) in 1887. The novel became a play, Madame Butterfly, by the American author David Belasco (curiously, another of his dramas provided Puccini with the source for the latter's La Fanciulla del West) before becoming an Italian opera. In each instance, a patina of authenticity was provided by incorporating Japanese motifs but the works remained firmly located in the West, not least because of their attitudes towards Japan.
Puccini was as liable to turn to the American west as the East when seeking ideas for his work, and this was equally true of his contemporary, the French couturier Paul Poiret, who might turn to China for pieces such as his "Confucius coat" of 1906, but could just as easily dip into the archives of the Ottoman empire or even look back to 18th century Europe. Today's designers continue to consider the east a visual primer.
Kelly Hoppen, an interior decorator based in London, drops collections of Chinese lacquer boxes and scroll paintings into properties she has been asked to furnish just as John Galliano borrowed features from traditional Chinese dress for his first Christian Dior collection two years ago. The results were about as authentic as a Dior men's wear collection in 1995 which took Ireland as its inspiration. No one in this country would consider wearing the resultant jumble of lurid tweeds. Here lies the paradox of Western preoccupation with the East; chinoiserie in whatever form or from whatever period bears little relation to its supposed source of inspiration. Inescapably a product of its own culture, the exotic content is likely to be applied last and to remain on the surface. It is as substantial and durable as Madonna's latest transformation.