The Butterfly of Paris: Hanae Mori

Few Japanese designers of the twentieth century achieved international recognition on the scale of Hanae Mori. The major retrospective that the National Art Center in Tokyo dedicates to the designer in 2026, one hundred years after her birth, retraces the trajectory of a figure who transformed fashion into a space of dialogue between East and West. The exhibition, titled Hanae Mori. Vital Type, brings together around four hundred works including haute couture garments, photographs, drawings, textile samples and archival materials. The display follows the designer’s career chronologically, from her beginnings in the 1950s to her international recognition, offering a broad overview of a body of work that marked the history of Japanese fashion. Mori began her career designing costumes for Japanese cinema in the postwar years. Within a short time she developed a distinctive language that combined the elegance of Western couture with materials and motifs drawn from Japanese tradition. Fabrics such as Nishijin-ori and chirimen were reinterpreted in modern garments, creating a style that quickly attracted international attention. The butterfly became the emblem of this aesthetic, appearing frequently in her most celebrated designs. It was not simply a decorative element. For Mori it represented transformation and freedom, a metaphor for the new identity of women emerging in postwar Japan. In 1965 the designer presented her work in New York, and in 1977 she became the first Asian designer admitted as an official member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris. The title of the exhibition refers to a concept Mori introduced in 1961 in the magazine Soen: the idea of the “Vital Type”, an energetic and independent woman oriented toward the future. This ideal, combining professional ambition with family life, reflected the designer’s own biography as she built a global career at a time when women’s presence in the fashion industry was still limited. Through garments, documents and archival material, the retrospective shows how Hanae Mori’s fashion was also a cultural phenomenon. Her collections helped bring Japanese aesthetics onto international runways, anticipating the dialogue between cultures that has become a defining feature of global fashion.