Translation from Japanese to European – Weekend – Kommersant

Couturier Hanae Mori died in Tokyo at the age of 96 — she started after the war with a dress-fitting studio for American military wives, became the first Asian member of the Parisian Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, built a real empire and died forgotten, at least in the western part peace. Meanwhile, it was she who opened the very possibility of conquering this part of the world for that great wave of Japanese fashion avant-garde that came after her.

Text: Elena Stafieva

Hanae Mori was the first to understand that it was necessary to combine Japanese with Western: Japanese and Western understanding of beauty, Japanese and Western textile culture, Japanese and Western concept of femininity. “When Kenzo, Kansai Yamamoto and Issei Miyake were studying design, they often came to my studio,” said Hanae Mori in 1982 of the next, second generation of Japanese designers who instilled Japanese decorativeness into Western fashion. But the third generation – Yoji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakuba – will, with the help of the Japanese, radically turn over, and in some places literally turn the Western inside out. But it was Hanae Mori who started this march to the West, creating what critics would call East-West fusion.

She was born in 1926 to a bourgeois Japanese family, studied at the Tokyo Women’s Christian University, graduated in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in literature, and in the same year married Kei Mori, who came from a family of textile manufacturers – an ideal start in life for a girl from respectable Japanese middle class.

However, her marriage became a fact not only of her personal, but also of her professional biography. Kei Mori was instrumental in starting the business under the Hanae Mori brand, and his family business, textile manufacturing, was instrumental in the formation of the East-West fusion.

“I was a very good housewife, but not for long. I didn’t want to stay at home – I wanted to work, so I asked my husband – he’s Japanese, very tough, but very good – and we talked about it for about a month. Then I went to study at the Tokyo School of Design, ”and so began her life’s work. In 1951, she opened a tiny studio above the noodle shop—two assistants and three old sewing machines—and one day a movie producer walked in. And then for five years she worked as a costume designer for all the leading Japanese directors of that time, including, for example, making costumes for the great Yasujiro Ozu’s “Early Spring”. She herself was the heroine of Ozu – the perfect young woman from a good family, who at some point makes her choice.

Hanae Mori has told many times what was the turning point in her biography – fitting at Chanel in 1960. By that time, she already had two sons, a reputation in the film world – and also the feeling that she was in a professional impasse. And so the argument with Chanel about which color would suit her best – Chanel insisted on orange, and Maury wanted black – returned her, as she put it, “fashionable mood.” She realized that she wanted to work in Paris and be a real couturier.

Actually, who, if not Chanel, could have arisen in this place in history? Hanae Mori herself was such a Japanese Coco Chanel – not in the sense, of course, of cuts and style, but in the sense of the general idea: absolute, traditionally understood elegance. Hence the entire list of her clients: from Crown Princess Masako, whom Mori sewed a wedding dress, to Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, Renata Tebaldi, Princess Grace, etc., etc., all the way to all the nameless wives of the heads of Japanese corporations, who invariably had mind-blowingly expensive Hanae Mori suits and dresses in their wardrobes.

Bourgeois respectable elegance, impeccable bon ton – that’s what Hanae Mori so brilliantly embodied. And her personal style, demeanor only supported all this: always smiling, restrained, but modest and friendly, generally embodying everything that is described by the low-key expression – yes, that very ideal Ozu girl. But she also became one of Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs: by the early 1990s, her empire was worth half a billion dollars. But only such a woman in the rigidly patriarchal world of Japanese business could exist – no feminism, everything is very traditional, otherwise she would simply not be accepted. Her husband becomes a household name: for example, Michael Chow, the creator of the legendary restaurant project Mr. Chow, told his wife Tina, his business partner and true queen of bohemian New York in the 1980s, “OK, I’ll be your Mr. Hanae Mori.”

It was in New York that Hanae Mori began to build her transnational empire, knowing full well that her style would be adopted by the conservative American elite. And so it happened: after her first show in New York in 1975, her models appear at all major retailers in America. And not just appear – she becomes one of the main fashion names in American high society. She approaches Paris only in the late 1970s.

Hanae Mori arrives in Paris when she is already over 50, she is already rich and famous across the ocean (even across both oceans, both in America and in Japan), but becoming a couturier – and this was precisely her goal – is possible only in Paris. And she becomes one: in 1977 she was accepted into the High Fashion Syndicate, and she opened a store at the most couture address in the world – on Montaigne Avenue. She is extremely welcomed by the fashion press, comparing with Coco Chanel and Madame Gre and calling her the embodiment of the classics. And this attitude will continue throughout her couture career.

The 1970s was, of course, the ideal time for Hanae Mori’s style – her chiffon tunics and togas, her silk dresses, flowing, flowing, bright, painted with traditional Japanese patterns – chrysanthemums, reeds, Mount Fuji, Hokusai wave and, of course, butterflies, became her symbol. All this fit perfectly into the fashion of the 1970s, in general, into New Age Orientalism. Marisa Berenson, Lauren Hutton and other major beauties of that time appeared on the pages of the world’s main Vogs in fluttering transparent robes, pink, yellow, green, along which butterflies flew and mountains stretched up and trees bent. Idealized, decorative Japan – this is exactly how the West imagined it, and at the same time in understandable Western silhouettes and lines. Exactly the same thing worked in Japan itself: Mori gave emancipated Japanese women suits for work and a generally westernized lifestyle – with cocktails, weddings and corporate dinners. However, the tradition of Mori also did not leave her attention and regularly presented kimono collections.

The 1980s, with their love of bright colors, further strengthened her business, which by that time consisted not only of women’s clothing – there was everything from children’s things to dishes and furniture, it really was an empire. But in the early 1990s, the empire began to decline. The very concept of fashion has changed, there has been an avant-garde explosion in fashion, the era of deconstructivism has begun – and completely different names have been assumed under the term “Japanese designers”. In 2002, her pret-a-porter business was sold, but the last couture collection was presented in Paris in 2004 to loud applause from the public and the press.

At the age of 78, Hanae Mori retired, and over the following years she practically disappeared from Western fashion consciousness, leaving only vague memories of flying butterflies on the once famous chiffon tunics and falling petals on the no less famous silk “chrysanthemum pajamas”.