Hanae Mori Obituary
Hanae Mori has been a simultaneous fashion translator in her five decades as a designer: transforming traditional Japanese fabrics into unscary garments for westerners, and creating cuts, Western cuts, shapes and ways of wearing. understandable for Japanese women. She was particularly skilled, being from the only family in her town who had dressed in Western clothing at the time and the only girl in a skirt and blouse from her kimono school.
Mori, who died at the age of 96, never intended to be a designer; the tailoring course she took in post-war Tokyo in her early twenties was only meant to equip her to make clothes for herself and her future children. But she was absorbed in Western technicalities - irregularly shaped pieces, many with curved outlines, darts, gathers and drapes, all sewn together to tightly wrap a body where a simple Japanese tubular construction wrapped.
She opened a small workshop above a noodle bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1951. The The neighborhood had been wiped out during World War II, except for its train station, around which, during the American occupation, a vast black market and an entertainment economy for Americans and Japanese alike developed. Mori, along with a few assistants and three second-hand sewing machines, created bespoke and made-to-order fashionable western women's clothing for both cultures.
The region had a large new cinema attracting film professionals; she was first asked by a producer to supply clothes, then to design costumes for films – she worked on hundreds over a decade – and she also styled movie stars' own wardrobes. At the same time, with her husband, Kenzo Mori – an executive from a family of textile manufacturers – acting as director, she grew with the national economy from makeshift jobs...
Hanae Mori has been a simultaneous fashion translator in her five decades as a designer: transforming traditional Japanese fabrics into unscary garments for westerners, and creating cuts, Western cuts, shapes and ways of wearing. understandable for Japanese women. She was particularly skilled, being from the only family in her town who had dressed in Western clothing at the time and the only girl in a skirt and blouse from her kimono school.
Mori, who died at the age of 96, never intended to be a designer; the tailoring course she took in post-war Tokyo in her early twenties was only meant to equip her to make clothes for herself and her future children. But she was absorbed in Western technicalities - irregularly shaped pieces, many with curved outlines, darts, gathers and drapes, all sewn together to tightly wrap a body where a simple Japanese tubular construction wrapped.
She opened a small workshop above a noodle bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 1951. The The neighborhood had been wiped out during World War II, except for its train station, around which, during the American occupation, a vast black market and an entertainment economy for Americans and Japanese alike developed. Mori, along with a few assistants and three second-hand sewing machines, created bespoke and made-to-order fashionable western women's clothing for both cultures.
The region had a large new cinema attracting film professionals; she was first asked by a producer to supply clothes, then to design costumes for films – she worked on hundreds over a decade – and she also styled movie stars' own wardrobes. At the same time, with her husband, Kenzo Mori – an executive from a family of textile manufacturers – acting as director, she grew with the national economy from makeshift jobs...
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