Hanae Mori was a simultaneous translator of fashion over her five decades as a designer: turning Japanese traditional fabrics into garments unscary for westerners to wear, and making western cut, fit, shape and ways of wearing comprehensible to Japanese women. She was uniquely qualified, being from the only family in her town who had dressed in western clothes at the time and the sole girl in skirt and blouse at her kimono’ed school.
Mori, who has died aged 96, never intended to be a designer; the dressmaking course she took in postwar Tokyo in her early 20s was only to equip her to make clothes for herself and her future children. But she became absorbed by western technicalities – irregular-shaped pieces, many with curved outlines, darts and gathers and drapes, all seamed together to sheath a body closely where simple Japanese tube construction wrapped it.
