Issey Miyake - Fashion and Innovation

Issey Miyake (Issey Miyake) was a famous, revolutionary, and influential Japanese fashion designer, renowned for his groundbreaking, innovative and technological designs. He is considered a fashion designer whose distinctive body of work had never been seen before, and became one of the most prominent voices in the fashion world beginning in the 1970s. Miyake founded an internationally acclaimed fashion brand and, throughout more than 50 years of creative work, experimented with innovative and traditional techniques, combining them in his creations.

Issey Miyake was born in April 1938 in Hiroshima, Japan, and died in August 2022 at the age of 84 after developing liver cancer. He was just seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city during World War II in 1945. He survived the bombing (which killed 140,000 people!) but was left with a pronounced limp. Three years after the bombing, his mother died from radiation exposure. He did not speak about it at length, but in 2009 he wrote an article about it in The New York Times, in which he said he did not want to be known as “the designer who survived the atomic bombing.”

Fashion designer Issey Miyake at a press conference in Tokyo, 2016. Photo: Hsinhuei Chiou, via Wikimedia Commons

As a young adult, he studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo and graduated in 1964, at the age of 26. After graduating, he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris, then went on to work with renowned fashion designers such as Guy Laroche (Guy Laroche) and Givenchy (Givenchy). He later also lived briefly in New York, where he worked with Geoffrey Beene, and in 1970 returned to Tokyo and founded the Miyake Design Studio. Shortly afterward, he also opened a boutique in Paris.

During that decade, his designs came to the attention of the international fashion industry. His innovative work was first shown in Paris, making him the first Japanese designer to present his work internationally and a pioneer among a group of Japanese fashion designers who became known in the West and ventured beyond Japan’s borders, including Kenzo Takada, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons.

See iconic runway photos from the 1995 Pleats Please collection in Paris in the official Vogue Runway show archive.

In 1970, he founded his design studio in Tokyo, Japan’s capital, and the following year made his New York debut. By the 1980s, he was already known as one of the most innovative designers, thanks to his extensive work combining novel materials in clothing, such as plastic, with traditional Japanese materials and paper.

Miyake formed close friendships with several artists and visionaries, including designer Ron Arad and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, for whom he designed the black turtlenecks he regularly wore and which became synonymous with him.

Another admirer of Issey Miyake was Zaha Hadid, who loved wearing his clothes.

As a child, Issey Miyake dreamed of becoming an athlete, which explains the movement in his clothes and in his fashion shows, which were like dance performances in which the clothes played supporting roles.

 

"I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes were also meant for people to dance or laugh,” Issey Miyake

 

"I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh", Issey Miyake 

In the late 1980s, Issey Miyake began experimenting with new methods of creating pleats, aiming to give the wearer freedom of movement while making the garment easy to wash.

His experiments led him to develop a new pleating method in 1993: first, he cut and sewed the garment, then clamped it between two layers of paper and pressed it between bursts of hot steam to create the pleats. He used this method to create pleated costumes for the Frankfurt Ballet.

Issey Miyake’s distinctive costumes for the Frankfurt Ballet (1993). Click here to watch a focused video clip from the BBC showing dancer Kate Strong performing in these pleated costumes.

 

You can’t talk about Issey Miyake without talking about pleating. A few words about pleating: “Plissé” is a French word meaning “folds.” The term refers to fabric woven or gathered into numerous, permanent, uniform folds. The fabric “remembers” and retains its pleats even after being removed from the paper mold, pleating machine, or knitting machine, depending on the type of fabric used.

To make pleats, a pattern with the desired folds is made from two identical layers of cardboard. The two cardboard templates are then opened out (that is, the pattern is unfolded, with the cardboard laid flat on a table), the fabric is placed between the two cardboard layers, the three layers are clamped together, and they are all folded together. The closed template, with the fabric sandwiched between the cardboard layers, is then placed in an oven for a variable amount of time, depending on the type of fabric and the complexity of the pattern. Pleating patterns range in complexity, with the most basic and historically popular pattern being the accordion, reminiscent of a fan fold.

You can see the traditional, painstaking process of trapping and folding fabrics in the official Instagram account of Atelier Ateliers Lognon.

 

Pleating is one of the earliest techniques, developed in ancient Egypt around 3000 BCE. The Egyptians created folds in fabric using various molds and set the pattern with a heavy metal object. Throughout history, clothing and textiles have served to protect the body, but not only that—they have also served as a form of visual communication, expressing the wearer’s status. Different techniques were developed to distinguish between fabrics and give them different meanings, creating volume, texture, and distinctive details in the fabric. And that is how pleating developed.

Issey Miyake’s designs are recognizable from a distance and combine innovative techniques with ancient Japanese tradition. His fashion house remained at the forefront of international fashion brands for many years, and the name “Issey Miyake” became synonymous with quality, innovation, and originality.

An example of Issey Miyake’s technological innovation: a fabric developed by the fashion house in 2016 called Baked Stretch

One example is the collection he launched in 1993, which became an iconic collection from the Pleats Please line, featuring lightweight pleated clothes that crossed gender and age boundaries, and were suitable for all seasons. These polyester garments can be machine-washed, rolled up in a suitcase, and unpacked looking as fresh and springy as they did before packing.

To discover the changing silhouettes, distinctive textures, and seasonal brand lookbooks, visit the official Pleats Please Issey Miyake page.

And speaking of innovation, Miyake created another artistic and design innovation as early as 1998 in a joint project with textile designer Dai Fujiwara, formerly the fashion house’s artistic director. The project was called A-POC (short for A Piece of Cloth). The technique they developed involves entering garment pattern and size data into a computer, then knitting or weaving the garment directly onto a roll of fabric. The garment can then be cut straight from the roll, reducing fabric waste.

To see the historic and fascinating moment when 23 models walked the runway together, joined inside one continuous roll of red fabric, click here to watch a focused clip from the finale of the A-POC Spring/Summer 1999 show.

Issey Miyake Fashion House: In 1994, the menswear design division was handed over to Naoki Takizawa, and five years later, he also took over the womenswear division. Miyake passed these divisions on so he could devote all his energy to research. In 2007, Naoki Takizawa became an independent designer within the Issey Miyake Group, and Dai Fujiwara was appointed head of the Issey Miyake Fashion House. Miyake continued to oversee all the collections presented to date, while freeing himself to develop additional products and ideas, including his cosmetics and fragrance line. His first perfume, L'eau d'Issey (Issey's water), was first launched in 1992; its name is a play on words, since in French it sounds identical to the word “odyssey.” The bottle, designed by Miyake, is based on the sight of the moon behind the Eiffel Tower, as seen from Miyake’s apartment in Paris. This perfume is a success story that has continued to sell in large quantities ever since.

Miyake will be remembered forever as one of the most innovative and prolific inventors in fashion. His true charm lay not only in his boundless talent, but also in his humility about his work and in his kind, unassuming nature: “I make things,” he would say simply, without making grand claims about being such a great and talented fashion designer. His designs were made to meet the modern needs of his clients. In 2016, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian—one of his last interviews—he said: “In Paris, we call people who make clothes ‘couturiers,’ designers who develop new garments, but really, the job of design is to create something that works in real life. Design should offer a solution.”

ISSEY MIYAKE “Steam Stretch” Concept Movie from WOW inc. on Vimeo.

 

Image credit for the article’s cover: Pleats Please design by Issey Miyake in collaboration with Yasumasa Morimura (1997). Photo: RISD Museum collection