Born in 1926 in Mukaichi, Shimane Prefecture, Mori was the daughter of  stylish parents, a doctor (who hoped his daughter would follow him into the profession) and a homemaker. “We were the only ones in my hometown who dressed Western-style. It was embarrassing for me as a child to be different, but I guess we were rather envied, too,” she told the AP in 1996. In occupied Japan she read Gone With the Wind and at some point observed the wives of the Allies altering their Western clothes for fit. Post-war, Mori completed a degree in Japanese literature at Tokyo Women’s Christian University, then married the scion of a textile manufacturer, the “liberated (in her words) Kenzo Mori. “I was a very nice housewife for one month, but I did not like to be at home. I wanted to be working, so I ask my husband—he’s Japanese, very strong but very nice—and we discussed it for a month. Then I went to designing school in Tokyo.”

In 1951 she started working over a noodle shop with two assistants and three used sewing machines. About four years later her short-skirted designs were discovered in a shop window by a bunch of businessmen. The next day, one of them, a director, came back and asked her to create costumes, and for about five years Mori, as The Newsweek Service put it, “was the Edith Head of the Japanese film industry.” By 1960, Mori was a mother of two and thinking of walking away from it all, but she claimed that a fitting with Coco Chanel (Mori was the client), where they came to a compromise over the orange the Frenchwoman wanted her to wear, and the black that Mori preferred, put her back on course. “That meeting was fateful,” she’d later say. “I was back in the couture mood again and wanted to set up shop in Paris.”

Mori counted Princess Grace, Nancy Reagan Bianca Jagger, and Crown Princess Michiko who wore a Mori dress on her wedding day, as clients. Vogue featured the work of the “famous-in-America Hanae Mori” regularly in the late 1960s, photographing both her lighter-than-air tunics in wonderful colors, and dresses in the “cookie cutter” silhouette of the time, featuring Japanese motifs, particularly the butterfly, which was the symbol of the house.

“Couture is her ‘physiological essence of creation.’ Unless she does it, there is no reason for her to be a designer,” wrote a journalist in 1977, the year Mori started showing her one-of-a-kind creations in Paris and joined the Chambre Syndicale. “My designs are international,” Mori said at the time.

Prints were a mainstay chez Mori. Besides using Japanese motifs, she worked with silk, and used kimono fabrics in her work even as the kimono was less worn. “I cannot force ladies to wear [the] kimono, but I can create the atmosphere of the kimono,” she said in 1983. It was her gift to create beautifully made clothes that had the allure of the “other” for both Western and Eastern women alike.

Mori’s arc, as  Robert Trumbell noted in The New York Times, is a post-war Japanese success story. Nonetheless, she remained a product of her time: She was conservative in dress and in certain ways of being. She liked to say she was her husband’s employee, for example. But if there was a sense of correctness in her work, there was also hidden strength. The writer of a 1990 Vogue article on Japanese fashion quoted Mori, “the high priestess of Japanese conservative fashion,” as saying that “the whole Japanese concept of beauty is based on refined hiding, or concealment, of things.” While always maintaining a sense of propriety, Mori had a larger and more generous mission, one that opened doors for many others.