Hanae Mori was a simultaneous interpreter of fashion during her five decades as a designer: turning traditional Japanese fabrics into harmless garments for Westerners to wear and making Western cut, fit, shape and modes of dress comprehensible for Japanese women. She was uniquely qualified, being from the only family in her town that wore western clothes at the time, and the only girl in a skirt and blouse at her kimono school.
Mori, who has died aged 96, never intended to become a designer; the tailoring course she took in post-war Tokyo in her early 20s was only to equip her to make clothes for herself and her future children. But it adopted Western techniques – irregularly shaped pieces, many with curved contours, darts, gathers and curtains, all tied together to wrap a body close to where a simple Japanese tube wrapped it.
Photo: Chicago History Museum/Getty
She started a small atelier above a noodle bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1951. The district had disappeared during World War II, except for its railway station, around which, during the US occupation, a large market grew black and entertainment economy for Americans and Japanese. Mori, with several assistants and three second-hand sewing machines, created fashionable Western women’s clothing to specifications and made to order for both cultures.
The area had a large new movie theater that attracted film industry professionals; first a producer asked her to supply clothing items, then to design costumes for films – she worked on hundreds over a decade – and also styled the outfits of the film’s stars. At the same time, with her husband, Kenzo Mori—an executive from a textile manufacturing family—acting as manager, she expanded along with the national economy from makeshift workshop to boutique.
Mori quickly came to represent fashion in Japan, introducing the latest trends in a newspaper that evolved into a magazine, Ryuko Tsushin. She admonished women for their difficult transition into Western clothing, which made them uncomfortable by exposing more than their necks and hands, mystified by foreign accessories, and unable to kneel on the painted floor of a house without a chair. .
She progressed so much that she took an unusual approach to studying French couture; in 1960, she traveled to Paris to meet and order clothes from designers she respected, including Hubert de Givenchy and Coco Chanel – who shocked Mori by advising her to wear orange to enter. Japanese women were not expected to stand out: subtlety, reserve, what Mori called “refined concealment,” were their ideals.
On her return to Japan, her color shone through and she synthesized a bolder, fused mode, Western in cut, Eastern in fabric and pattern, suggesting the “atmosphere of a kimono” without its limitations.
Mori’s first international couture show, East Meets West, in New York in 1965, was timed to appeal to the jet-set era’s taste for silk floating in and out of exotic destinations; she did the glitter, secured from high-end boutiques, and began amassing a client list that later included Bianca Jagger, Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Princess Grace of Monaco. Masako Owada also heard about her 1993 marriage to Crown Prince Naruhito.
She also learned a lot in the US about ready-to-wear quality, a new concept in Japan, and licensing; through them she established her name and the butterfly logo in Japan and around the world.
Unlike most designers, she was already financially secure and intercontinental famous when she opened her Paris salon in 1977 and was appointed to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.
Mori attributed her independence and curiosity to her father, Tokuzo Fujii, a progressive surgeon in Muikaichi (now Yoshika), Shimane, in southwestern Japan; he, his daughter, and four sons all wore Western dress, made from imported textiles brought back from visits to big cities, while Hanae’s mother, Nobu (nee Matsuura), wore beautiful kimonos ordered by catalog from stores big; both her parents were from wealthy families.
Nobu moved to Tokyo so the children could be educated there; during the war, the entire family except Hanae was evacuated; she had retreated to a factory and defiantly stayed in the city during its destruction. Like other women during the war, she adopted peasant workwear – loose jackets over loose-waisted trousers; Mori knew that was the moment when western clothing became their future.
She married in 1947 after receiving a degree in Japanese literature from Tokyo Christian Women’s University that same year. “I was a very good housewife for a month, but I didn’t like being at home,” she said, and started the clothes design and construction course.
Her husband supported her work and for decades was her public front in a male-only business world of contacts and contracts. It was not until 1986 that Mori was invited to be the first female member of the Association of Corporate Directors in Japan. At the time, she was a multi-million dollar earner, showing fashion in Tokyo, New York and Paris, and fully expanded into cosmetics, perfumes, home furnishings – the entire business of the brand’s range.
A shift in the east-west balance that had created her success also determined her fate. Young designers such as Kenzo, Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, whom Mori had encouraged, created a new view of Japanese design in the west, sharper and less sleek than Mori, while Japan was fully integrated into world fashion. and was likely to wear Ralph Lauren. denim, woven in Japan, like a Mori chiffon dress.
She sold her stores and licensed businesses to an investment group in 2002 and, with debts of ¥10 billion, filed for bankruptcy for the rest of her empire, showing a final Paris collection in 2004 and exiting in retirement. But her image in Japan shines forever, from fashion pioneer to old empress. She was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1989, and in 1996 she was awarded the Order of Culture of Japan.
Kenzo died in 1996. Their two sons, Akira and Kei, who worked in Mori’s businesses, survived her.
