Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9003290403
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELISABETH BUMILLER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: TOKYO LENGTH: Long
The second thing to know is that Mori's story parallels the rise of postwar Japan. It is the tale of a young dressmaker with a small shop above a noodle restaurant in a bombed-out section of Tokyo who used what she had - talent, guts and her husband's money and indulgence - to become the premier costume designer during the "golden age" of the Japanese film industry, and then the country's first high-fashion designer to break into the overseas market.
Today she is one of the most powerful businesswomen in Japan. Through it all, Mori did not so much rebel against the conventions of her culture as ignore them.
At 63, Mori is a queen bee of Tokyo's establishment society - a safe, gray-suited amalgam of presidents from Japan's leading companies and ambassadors from large Western nations, with a sprinkling of creative personalities of acceptable stature. Hers definitely is not the world of avant-garde Japanese designer Issey Miyake, the upstart of the 1970s, with whom she has attained a peaceful coexistence.
She has designed clothes for every Japanese prime minister's wife since 1967. Over the years, her other clients have included Nancy Reagan, Imelda Marcos, Princess Grace of Monaco and Princess Shams Pahlavi, the twin sister of the late shah of Iran. And back home in Tokyo, the city's Old Guard views at least one Hanae Mori in the closet as de rigueur.
"Anybody who is anybody would want to be married in a Hanae Mori wedding dress," decrees Ise Togo, the wife of the late Fumihiko Togo, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States.
Mori's haute couture daytime suits sell for $9,000; an evening gown goes for $26,000.
\ Four decades ago, just after the war, the newly married Hanae Mori, a doctor's daughter from a conservative family in the mountains near Hiroshima in southwestern Japan, found herself facing the rest of her life as a housewife. Her husband, Ken Mori, a textile executive, was consumed by his work; she was wildly bored by what was, and still is, the expected role of most women in Japan.
"I would make my husband some warm, delicious soup," she says, "and suddenly he would phone and say an appointment had come up, and that he couldn't take dinner at home that night." She was never invited out with her husband's friends - "Japan was a gentlemen's country," she says - and when her husband brought associates home, she stayed in the kitchen to cook.
"Like a maid," she says, speaking softly, but pointedly. "I wanted to be different."
Hanae Mori strides into a beige-and-cream-colored meeting room on the fourth floor of the Hanae Mori Building, her international headquarters, a glass and steel complex designed by Kenzo Tange on Omotesando, Tokyo's boutique-saturated shopping street. Tourists and Tokyo's rich browse through the merchandise on the first floor of her building.
What they find is a sampler of her empire, produced either by one of her 20 companies or under a licensing agreement: dresses, scarves, men's ties, jewelry, handbags, perfume, golf clothes, children's clothes, umbrellas, belts, shoes. In department stores there are also Hanae Mori futons, carpets, towels and sheets.
Her holdings include a publishing house, run by her son, Akira, that puts out the Japanese versions of Women's Wear Daily and W, as well as a glossy high fashion magazine and Voice, a magazine modeled after Andy Warhol's Interview.
Last year, the Hanae Mori group of companies had global sales of $350 million.
Mori takes a seat, apologizes for arriving a few minutes late - no one is ever late in Japan. She is in a conservative black wool suit with a printed silk blouse; a front section of her chin-length black hair is pulled up in a barrette away from her face, like a busy working woman who has not had time to fuss with her hair in the morning. She wears big round glasses and minimal jewelry. The look is not drop-dead chic, but accessible elegance.
For all her success, Mori is an approachable woman, low-key, gracious and restrained - a manner that is the result of her conservative upbringing, and crucial to her success in Japan. In Tokyo's male-dominated business culture, a more overtly hard-driving woman would have been shunned.
"Her husband runs the whole business, and is very tight with the budget," says her friend Bernard Krisher, a former Newsweek correspondent in Tokyo and now an adviser to a Japanese publishing company. "But what she says goes." As Mori's son Kei told a magazine interviewer in 1985: "Mother thinks of herself as Art. Father thinks of himself as Commerce."
\ Although Mori has never had the impact on world fashion that Issey Miyake has, she is seen in Tokyo as the pioneer who has endured. "Some seasons she's out of fashion, and she doesn't get much publicity," says her friend Bernard Krisher. "But in the end, she'll really be recognized as the person who made fashion in Japan."
Sachiko Oshima, the editor of Katei-Gaho, Japan's leading women's magazine, says Mori has taught Japanese women, once bound by the kimono, how to dress for evening in the modern world. "Japan didn't have the tradition of formal Western clothes," she says. "But through her fashion, women began to understand what to wear for important occasions."
Hanae Mori's first dressmaking shop was in Shinjuku, a middle-class shopping area north of the center of Tokyo that had been flattened during the bombing raids. After the war, it became the site of one of Tokyo's biggest black markets, selling imported food and clothing from the West, and also a favorite haunt of the Japanese artists, writers and film directors who liked to drink in the neighborhood's cheap restaurants and bars. Mori's shop was across from a movie house that showed the latest films from America and Europe.
One day a Japanese movie producer - en route, perhaps, to a Shinjuku bar - noticed the same window displays, walked in, and asked Mori to design the costumes for his upcoming film.
Ultimately, Hanae Mori designed costumes for 500 movies and worked with every major director of the period, with the exception of Akira Kurosawa, who made few films in contemporary settings. She had become as famous in Japan as some of the stars she dressed.
But by the early '60s, with the advent of television, the Japanese film industry was on the edge of collapse. "And me also," says Mori. She knew she would never make costumes at the volume she once had, and realized she had no interest in making clothes for private clients. Exhausted, she decided to quit altogether.
Soon afterward, a vacation in Paris proved to be a turning point. She arrived dressed as usual, all in black, with her long hair in a bun, but decided for the first time in her life to see what it would be like to be a customer instead of a designer. At the salon of Coco Chanel, Mori tried on a blazing orange suit - the "color of the sun," as the fitter described it, in "the land of the rising sun." For Mori the suit was much too bright, and she chose only a blouse and an inner lining in the color. And yet she left affected by the experience.
She also realized in Paris that she might be able to make a living as a high fashion designer. Returning to Tokyo invigorated, she quickly set about creating her new look for Japan. Four years later, in 1965, she collected her nerve and headed for America, attracting the interest of American fashion writers by sending out hand-written invitations on rice paper to a fashion show at the then-chic Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue.
On Saturday night 300 people had assembled at the Delmonico Hotel for Mori's big debut. Her collection, cherry blossoms, butterflies and Japanese brush strokes of her own design - was an instant hit.
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