Fashion designer Hanae Mori first opened her own atelier in 1951 in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, launching in 1965 in New York her seminal “East Meets West” collection. The latter was characterised by rich and colourful Japanese patterns on Japanese silk.
The first Japanese to be accepted in 1977 to show Haute Couture in Paris by the Chambre Syndicale, Mori retired after her last high fashion presentation in July 2004. Last October a new Hanae Mori line was created by Yu Amatsu.
The designer started his career thirteen years ago and moved in 2004 to New York where he worked as executive designer/main patterner for Jen Kao and Marc Jacobs, and as costume designer for several celebrities and performers. In 2009, he launched his brand, A Degree Farenheit.
Yu Amatsu's collection for Hanae Mori - showcased during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo - revolved around three main principles, silhouette, details and graphics
Leaving behind his formal eveningwear that had prevailed on the previous season's runway, the designer focused on wearable dresses and separates in a palette of soft and dove grays that he combined with pleasant pastel shades such as pale blue, mauve and soft yellow.
Pastels were also employed for the lacy looks, the fluid wide-legged pants and light trench coats (that were maybe more apt for a Spring/Summer collection), for the dresses in abstract geometric prints representing a stylised butterfly - the symbol of the fashion house - and the fur coats and blouses crisscrossed by Constructivist lines.
The brand currently focuses on graceful and elegant styles characterised by a good sense of balance, and developed with a contemporary and actively independent and ageless woman in mind, yet the inspiration behind this collection was mainly architectural, it came indeed from New York City’s High Line pedestrian pathway. In a way the runway progression of gray looks that turned into colourful ones could be almost a hint at the changes the pedestrian line went through.
The public park was indeed built on a historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side and it was redesigned to incorporate several plant species.
It would be interesting to ask the designer if the pastel palette in the collection was actually borrowed from the colours of the vegetation on the High Line and if the grays derived instead from black and white aerial views of the rail line (or if maybe the designer read Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us in which the author considered the High Line as an example of the reappearance of the wild in an abandoned area and was therefore making a comparison between concrete and nature).
What's for sure is that the graphic lines that criss-crossed some of the garments could represent in an abstract way the first section of the High Line that opened in 2009 and that runs from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, the second section that opened in 2011 and runs between West 20th and West 30th Streets and the third part, opened to the public in September 2014.
We will hopefully discover more about the designer's architectural inspirations in the next few months, what's for sure is that he certainly managed to reproduce through his clothes Hanae Mori's East meets West style, re-establishing the link that joins the iconic designer to architecture and that goes back to 1978 when Kenzo Tange designed the Hanae Mori Building.
Based in Tokyo's Omote-sando the building is considered as a striking local landmark thanks to its configuration. The structure looks indeed like a stack of reflective glass blocks that in plan form the spread wings of a butterfly - Hanae Mori's symbol.
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