IN MEMORY OF ISSEY MIYAKE FASHION DESIGNER 1938 – 2022 | 2022 OCTOBER

IN MEMORY OF
ISSEY MIYAKE FASHION DESIGNER
1938 – 2022

2022 OCTOBER ISSUE

Written | Andrew Sia
Image Illustrated | Elita Lam

IN MEMORY OF
ISSEY MIYAKE FASHION DESIGNER
1938 – 2022

It was in our October 2019 issue, we featured Issey Miyake under our column “Fashion Quote”. We introduced him as world-renowned Japanese fashion designer. I found the quote by another world-renowned architect, artist and designer, Zaha Hadid, she described Miyake’s clothes as, “when they are on show in the shop it’s one thing, but once you wear them, they become something else. They are animated.” That is perhaps the highest compliment for a fashion designer.

In Issey Miyake’s life, he encountered another icon, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who was a friend of Akio Morita, chairman of Song. Morita put him together with Steve Jobs for attempting to design the uniform for the staff of Apple. His staff scoffed at Steve Jobs as we can understand the corporate culture of the U.S. and Japan are so different. Instead the black turtleneck became the entrepreneur’s signature look.

Issey Miyake died on August 5, 2022, at the age of 84.

In his 50 years career, his clothes were worn by well-known figures in the U.S.—Grace Jones, who is a model, working for fashion houses like Yves St. Laurent, and Kenzo at one time and appeared on covers of Elle and Vogue. She is also known as singer and actress. Another celebrity—Meryl Streep, who was known as the best actress of the generation and received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades. Also Kim Kardashian, an American socialite, media personality and businesswoman.

Issey Miyake is best known for his sculptural pleated garments. He was awarded the Order of Culture in Japan in 2010, and the French Légion d’Honneur in 2016.

He was born in 1938, and when he was seven years old he witnessed the atomic born dropped in his home city of Hiroshima. He survived but his mother die from radiation exposure.

He studied graphic design in Tama Art University in Tokyo, one of the top art school in Japan, and graduated in 1964. He went to work in Paris as an assistant to Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. He moved to New York for a while and returned to Tokyo in 1970 and started his Miyake Design Studio. During his time in Japan, he explored the processing of technical fabrics. In 1973, he began to show his collection also in Paris.

Miyake’s signature pleats began to take shape in the late 1980s when he experimented with a technique that involved pleating clothes after they had been in cut-pieces, and used a heat press to shrink them, which in this case was to pleat them for shape and texture. The finished garment can be washed but air-dried and can still retained their shape.

He created the Pleats Please Issey Miyake line which he launched in 1993. He launched another innovation in 1998 known as A-POC, or A Piece of Cloth. This applied a new technique, whereby a single thread fed into an industrial knitting machine could create tubular garments through computer programming. Garments could then be cut into customized looks.

He is best known for the micro pleating, made from a near weightless polyester, featured waterfalls of razor-sharp, accordionlike pleats. It became the most recognized look without any body constrain.

His work can be found at the Musée des Art Décoratifs in Paris, where there are 54 pieces of clothes from him. The chief curator, Denis Bruna, mentioned him as “the designer who brought Japanese vision and techniques into western fashion and innovated through materials and shapes, while using traditional techniques, in particular the flat-cut commonly used in Japan where the garments only take shape on the body.”

Most of the Pleats Please clothes had no buttons, zippers or snaps. There were no tight armholes or waistlines. They were meant for casual-wearing without any underlining, only a bra and panties, and were opaque enough. Necklines were not deep and unrevealing. They mostly came in solid colors ad sometimes in prints.

The pleated clothes are easy care—machine washable—and can be rolled up and packed tightly in the luggage for traveling.

I only want to add one thing, L’eau d’Issey pour homme, a fragrance that he introduced for women and it was created by Jaques Cavallier. A slender, minimalist, inverted glass cone with a matt silver top accented with an orb resembled the moon. It was inspired by Issey Miyake’s glimpsing the moon rising over the Eiffel Tower one night in Paris.

Issey Miyake is perhaps best known as a designer whose styles combined the discipline of fashion with technology and art.

He stressed himself as not a fashion designer but as a person who made clothes and more for the common people than the rich and famous. He was a very private person and perhaps of what he witnessed when he was a young boy, it made him more sympathetic. His close relationship with his longtime coworker and once as the fit model in his studio, Ms. Kitamura, who worked with him for 50 years and she is now the president of his design studio.

We can find Issey Miyake’s garments in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He successfully open the door for the Japanese fashion for contemporaries like Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, and the like.

Issey Miyake is perhaps best known as a designer whose styles combined the discipline of fashion with technology and art.

Written before the press:

Issey Miyake – Known for his pragmatic and his dedication to create items that were comfortable, affordable, and practical for everyday use. I found his quote, “Design is not for philosophy, it’s for life.”

Last and not the least, I have bought the book, Pleats Please by Issey Miyake, and it will be featured in our book report in our January 2023 issue.