Many Seiko watches from the 1960’s through the mid-1980’s have rightly gone down as design classics, building a considerable following amongst watch collectors.
 
Conversely, some truly gorgeous watches from the same era produced by the same company have quietly slipped under the radar for the simple reason they were designed for the typically slighter wrist, ie: women - like this rather dainty and very atypical gold 1984 Seiko Seiko x Hanae Mori 1E20-0A10 "Butterfly" women’s watch, on its original gold bracelet and with original Seiko box.
 
The Seiko × Hanae Mori features a gold-tone case and signature butterfly motif designed by Japanese fashion designer Hanae Mori (Japanese: 森 英恵), one of only two Japanese women to have presented her collections on the runways of Paris and New York, and the first Asian woman to be admitted as an official haute couture design house by the Fédération française de la couture in France.  Her fashion house, opened in Japan in 1951, grew to become a $500 million international business by the 1990s.
 
Hanae (whose name means Blessed Wisdom) would argue with Kipling: she has had no difficulty bridging the gulf between East and West.  Indeed, her first success as a young designer in Tokyo was adapting traditional Japanese details (for instance, the flowing kimono sleeve) to Paris styles—mostly Dior—which she saw in Western movies and on American officers’ wives.  Brilliant colors were her own touch.  “During the war everything had been khaki and gray,” she recalls.  “Women were hungry for colorful things.”
 
Famed for her butterfly designs, Mori was born in the rural prefecture of Shimane, recalling in later life how the stylish clothes ordered for her as a girl by her doctor father from Mitsukoshi, a noted Tokyo department store, left her feeling "embarrassed".
 
Hanae Mori was a simultaneous translator of fashion over her five decades as a designer: turning Japanese traditional fabrics into garments unscary for westerners to wear, and making western cut, fit, shape and ways of wearing comprehensible to Japanese women. She was uniquely qualified, being from the only family in her town who had dressed in western clothes at the time and the sole girl in skirt and blouse at her kimono’ed school.  
 
Mori quickly came to represent fashion in Japan, introducing the latest trends in a newsletter that developed into a magazine, Ryuko Tsushin.  She advised women on their difficult transition to western wardrobes, which made them uncomfortable by exposing more than necks and hands, mystified by alien accessories and unable to kneel on the matted floor of a chairless home.
 
Mori designed three consecutive uniforms for the flight attendants of Japan Air Lines (JAL).  The first uniform was worn from 1967 to 1970; second, which created a sensation by featuring a miniskirt, worn from 1970 to 1977; and the third worn from 1977 to 1988.  In 1992, Mori designed the official uniform for the Japanese Delegation to the Barcelona Olympics and, in 1994, the official uniform for the Japanese Delegation to the Lillehammer Olympics.  
 
What has brought Mori famous customers like Princess Grace, Dewi Sukarno, Imelda Marcos and Martha Graham are her exquisite silkscreen fabric designs.  She borrows many of them from the ancient Kabuki theater and kimono prints, and works them into high-style Western clothes.  Colors are vivid—often combinations of sea green, fuchsia and turquoise—and imprinted with a Japanese chrysanthemum or butterfly, which has become her unofficial trademark.
 
Shows in Europe followed and she opened a fashion house in Paris, becoming the first Asian woman to be admitted to a French haute couture association.  "I chose the butterfly, symbolizing the Japanese woman spreading her wings around the world, as my theme," she added.
 
Her gowns billow around the wearer in layers of silk chiffon.  “Only a creative person can enjoy chiffon—the piling up of layer upon layer like a sculpture,” she says.  One fashion-conscious woman of the world whom Mori has inexplicably failed to impress is Jacqueline Onassis, who sent for some samples, tried the gowns on and returned them.
 
Regardless, in 1993, Masako, Crown Princess of Japan wore a sleeveless white gown designed by Mori for her wedding ceremony.  Mori had the patronage of Masako, Crown Princess of Japan, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, Renata Tebaldi, and Monegasque Princess and actress Grace Kelly.
 
It’s a shame these watches sometimes get passed over, because many of these smaller watches feature exquisite details – Seiko found an original, great looking formula for its watches, and stuck with it. The quartz movements Seiko designed for watches like these are tough and reliable – during its heyday, the movements were popular with armed forces for this same reason.
 
Seiko introduced the 1E20 line in 1983, and made them for at least a decade, and it's one of its many vintage women's watches lost to the ages.  Seiko discovered the secret to manufacturing mass-produced stylish and affordable watches.  And it never failed to make them stylish! 
 
This quite petite Seiko 1E20 comes on its original gold bracelet, Seiko  box, springbar tool and rugged travel case.