Biography

She designed uniforms for the Canadian, Japanese, Spanish and Swiss teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics, as well as the logo for the Houston (Texas) Rockets.

Most acclaimed designer in Japan. Designed the official poster for the Expo 1970 in Japan. Won a Grammy Award for the design of a Miles Davis record cover.

In 1988, she was nominated for two Tony Awards for the Broadway version of "M. Butterfly" as Best Scenic Designer and Best Costume Designer.

She was honored with a Google doodle on July 12, 2017, which would have been her 79th birthday.

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996.

[on being requested to provide a less restrictive costume] Jennifer Lopez asked me if I could make it more comfortable, but I said, "No, you're supposed to be tortured".

About working on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985): I wanted the sets to be more aggressively assertive. It would be like the sets themselves were characters, as though they were actors, and they would challenge the real actors. So that when the sets and the actors came together, they'd set off a spark and a new kind of energy.

Roman Polanski, while making Chinatown (1974), first proposed to define clearly the position of production designer. Polanski said that a film should be made with three heads working in finely tuned balance. One head is the production designer, who has full responsibility for visual elements in the film. Another is the director of photography, who has full responsibility for the images. And then there's the position called the director. It's the director who has overall responsibility. These three heads should steer a film production. And the production designer, ideally, would oversee everything from the film's title design to props and costumes to makeup and sets-all the visual elements of the film.

Yukio Mishima was, like other noted people in history, a very complex human being. Especially to live like he did in Japanese society. I think his complexity as a person ran quite deep. I thought it was possible to express that complexity visually to a certain degree.

I want to keep the audience in suspense until the very end of the show.