I exhibited my work in Paris on my way back, and this lead me to want to work in Paris. In 1975, I was invited by Princess Grace of Monaco to do a fashion show, and so I went to Monaco. This show, which was my first international show, was a huge success, and I continued to work in the United States for the next decade. I spent a few years studying “Japanese aesthetics,” and in 1965, I presented my first HANAE MORI collection in New York.

“This is not Japan!” – I decided to try my luck with creations that were made in Japan. The depiction of Madame Butterfly in the opera “Madame Butterfly” which I saw in New York. In New York, where I visited the summer of the same year, I felt strongly aware of my roots as a “Japanese person.” Cheap Japanese products sold in the basements of department stores. Through the fittings, I learned about the haute couture clothes-making system. Coco Chanel was still alive and well, and I became her first Asian haute couture customer, and had a suit made at Chanel. In January of 1961, I took a break and went to Paris, where I gathered information about collections for a newspaper company. I think I was trained by the master directors. Taking their cue from the legendary fashion designer Madame Hanae Mori herself, each fragrance in the Hanae Mori Parfums collection is crafted in Paris and. I was blessed with the opportunities to work on the wardrobes for several hundred Japanese movies.

She wrote columns for a fashion magazine and opened boutiques in Tokyo and other cities.When you look back at your life as a designer, what was the turning point for you? After a film producer spotted her work, she made costumes for hundreds of Japanese movies in the 1950s and ’60s, including Yasujiro Ozu’s “Early Autumn” and Yoshishige Yoshida’s “Farewell to the Summer Light.”įilm stars became clients. Mori studied dressmaking and in 1951 opened her atelier in Shinjuku, a shopping hub in Tokyo. Her survivors include both sons and eight grandchildren, two of whom, Hikari Mori and Izumi Mori, are well-known models.Įager for a career, Ms. They had two sons, Akira and Kei, who as adults helped run her businesses. When the war was over, she resumed studies at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and graduated in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in literature. Like many young Japanese women, she worked in a factory. Hanae was 15 when the war in the Pacific began. She was the only daughter among the six children of a surgeon and his wife. 8, 1926, in Muikaichi (now Yoshika), in Shimane Prefecture in southwestern Japan.

In the mid-’90s, her sales began to decline steadily, dragged down by a long economic slump and changing tastes that forced many haute couture designers, including Ms. Mori’s global annual sales had reached a peak of about $500 million. “In Tokyo’s male-dominated business culture, a more overtly hard-driving woman would have been shunned.” “For all her success, Mori is an approachable woman, low-key, gracious and restrained - a manner that is the result of a conservative upbringing, and crucial to her success in Japan,” The Washington Post said in a 1990 profile. Small and slender, with a heart-shaped smile, big round glasses and a soft voice, she was interviewed often by Western correspondents, who said she radiated quiet confidence and an innate gentleness. Mori was often as popular as the stars she dressed and appeared frequently in the news in Japan. Traveling the world in her own jetliner, dining with royalty and chief executives, Ms. Many also learned new ways of dressing for evening, and for weddings and other formal occasions, with Mori creations. Mori’s jackets, slacks, sweaters and skirts. She later produced lacquerware, fragrances for women and men, and even home furnishings.Īs Japan recovered from the destruction of wartime bombing and regained its economic footing with a rush of exuberance, women once confined to kitchens and limited to wearing traditional kimonos joined the work force in droves, and they bought Ms. Mori developed lines of evening gowns, daywear, business attire, and men’s and children’s clothing, as well as collections of shoes, handbags, gloves and scarves. With her textile-executive husband, Ken Mori, as her business manager, Ms. They were for a majority of women who did not seek the limelight, only the quiet pleasures of dressing in subtle colors and patterns: silk cocktail dresses with obi sashes, chiffon gowns afloat with purple-orange mists, and skirts and dresses printed with rose petals, reeds or wispy clouds. Her creations were not for women who wanted to make an entrance, as a Vogue editor put it.

Hanae mori