Hanae Mori was born in 1926 in Shimane Prefecture, Japan. She studied literature at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, married the textile executive Ken Mori in 1947, and opened a small dressmaking studio over a noodle shop in Shinjuku in 1951. Her studio costumed approximately five hundred Japanese films through the 1950s and 1960s, principally for Mifune Toshirō and Yasujirō Ozu.

The First Collection

In 1961 she travelled alone to New York, met Coco Chanel in Paris on the same trip, and returned to Japan resolved to present to the West. Her first New York collection, in November 1965, combined Japanese silk brocades, obi-inspired wide waistbands, and kimono-derived sleeves with the silhouette of a Western couture dress. The collection was bought in full by Bergdorf Goodman.

The Chambre Syndicale

On 25 January 1977 Mori was formally admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. She was fifty, and the first Asian couturier the federation had ever admitted. She opened her Avenue Montaigne salon the same year. She presented couture in Paris, without interruption, for the next twenty-eight years, retiring in July 2004 at seventy-eight.

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A kimono is a story. A dress is a sentence. I have tried, for fifty years, to make the dress contain the story. — Hanae Mori

The Butterfly

The butterfly, which Mori adopted as her house signature in 1965, appeared on nearly every couture collection she presented. It was embroidered, printed, beaded, and woven; it was the subject of her fragrance Hanae Mori Butterfly (1996), the most commercially successful Japanese designer fragrance of the twentieth century.

Mori was decorated with the French Légion d'Honneur in 1989, the Japanese Person of Cultural Merit in 1989, and the Order of Culture in 1996 — the highest civilian honour the Japanese government awards. She died in Tokyo on 11 August 2022, at 96. The Hanae Mori house continues under the direction of her granddaughter Izumi Mori.