She has designed for Japan's royal family, and publicly defended former Japanese prime minister Sosuke Uno during the scandal last year over his extramarital affair with a geisha. ![]() Mori knows and likes the international power elite. Hers is definitely not the world of avant-garde Japanese designer Issey Miyake, the upstart of the 1970s, with whom she has attained a peaceful coexistence. ![]() 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. Through it all, Mori did not so much rebel against the conventions of her culture as ignore them. Today she is one of the most powerful businesswomen in 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. Mori's story parallels the rise of postwar Japan. ![]() TOKYO - The first thing to know about Hanae Mori is never call her "Mrs.," always "Madame." She herself is not sure how "Madame Mori" started, but thinks it may have been coined 25 years ago by her old friend Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus, the Dallas department store that was the first in America to sell her silks and chiffons printed with butterflies and cherry blossoms, to the wives of rich Texas executives and oil men.
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