Unlike most couturiers, she was already financially secure and intercontinentally famous when she opened her salon in Paris in 1977, and was appointed to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She also learned much in the US about quality ready-to-wear, a new concept in Japan, and licensing through these she established her name and butterfly logo in Japan and around the world. Mori also dressed Masako Owada for her 1993 marriage to Crown Prince Naruhito. Mori’s first couture-level international show, East Meets West, in New York in 1965, was perfectly timed to appeal to the jet-set era’s taste for wearing floaty silk from, and in, exotic destinations she made the glossies, was stocked by high-end department stores and began to accumulate a client list that later included Bianca Jagger, Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Princess Grace of Monaco. On her return to Japan, her colouring brightened, and she synthesised a bolder, fusion mode, western in cut, eastern in fabric and pattern, suggesting “the atmosphere of a kimono” without its restrictions.Ī model presenting a wedding dress from Hanae Mori’s autumn-winter haute couture collection in Paris, 2000. Japanese women were not expected to stand out: subtlety, reticence, what Mori called “refined hiding”, were their ideals. She prospered so much that she took an unusual approach to studying French couture in 1960, she travelled to Paris to meet and order outfits from designers she respected, including Hubert de Givenchy and Coco Chanel – who shocked Mori by advising her that she should wear orange to make an entrance. She advised women on their difficult transition to western wardrobes, which made them uncomfortable by exposing more than necks and hands, mystified by alien accessories and unable to kneel on the matted floor of a chairless home. Mori quickly came to represent fashion in Japan, introducing the latest trends in a newsletter that developed into a magazine, Ryuko Tsushin. At the same time, with her husband, Ken Mori – an executive from a textile manufacturing family – acting as manager, she expanded along with the national economy from makeshift workshop to boutiques. The area had a big new cinema attracting 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 she also styled movie stars’ own wardrobes. Mori, with a couple of assistants and three secondhand sewing machines, created on-spec and made-to-order fashionable western women’s clothes for both cultures. The district had been wiped out during the second world war except for its railway station, around which, during the US occupation, grew a vast black market and entertainment economy for Americans and Japanese people. She started a small atelier above a noodle bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1951.
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