Throughout his career, Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, who has died of cancer aged 84, rejected terms like ‘fashion’.
But his work allowed much of the world to reimagine itself through clothing.
Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake studied graphic design in Tokyo, where he was influenced by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the black-and-white photography of Irving Penn.
As soon as the post-war restrictions barring Japanese citizens from traveling abroad were lifted, he left for Paris, arriving in 1964.
Part of Japan’s fashion revolution, Issey Miyake – who died on August 5 – changed the way we saw, dressed and made fashion
There, the young designer began to practice at the famous haute couture houses, Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. Such houses made expensive clothes that conformed to the prevailing standards of decency. Miyake had to go beyond that. Miyake was there for the Paris student revolt of 1968 and was galvanized by the youth earthquake that shook all the rules of society.
The concept of ready-to-wear by a couturier had been launched only a few years earlier when Yves Saint Laurent created Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in late 1966. The fashion system was changing and Miyake rose to the challenge.
The Japanese Fashion Revolution
Miyake arrived in Paris shortly after Kenzo’s “Jungle Jap” clothes had made waves, with their bright colors and unexpected patterns, based in part on Japanese artistic traditions.
The Japanese fashion revolution was beginning.
Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey – all born in the 1930s and 40s – rose to prominence in the 70s and appeared in Paris.
All questioned Eurocentric views of fashion and beauty. Japanese designers changed the Western focus on symmetry and order and adopted aspects of Japanese aesthetic systems, such as Yamamoto’s use of black with colors such as red, purple, cerise, brown and dark blue.
Miyake held his first show in New York in 1971 and in Paris in 1973. He integrated technology with tradition, exploring Japanese aesthetics and uncut and ill-fitting clothing. He also commissioned high-tech textiles that influenced fashion around the world.
Miyake’s BODY series included the famous plastic, rattan and resin bustiers in which the female body was re-imagined as a kind of armor. In February 1982, the popular magazine Artforum featured a Miyake bust on its cover. It was the first time a contemporary art magazine had featured fashion.
Body covering
Throughout his career, Miyake completely re-imagined the potential of textiles.
Working with his textile director Makiko Minagawa and Japanese textile factories, he began to create the famous Pleats collections: using heat-treated polyester textiles that are not pleated before sewing (a common practice), but are produced much more large and then folded in machines.
The 1989 Rhythm Pleats collection was inspired by the French artist Henri Rousseau: Miyake took elements of the color palette and strange sculptural shells that surrounded the women in these paintings, a good example of how his influences were always abstract and suggestive.
His highly commercial Pleats Please collection was launched in 1993.
The A-POC (One Piece of Cloth) collection (in collaboration with Dai Fujiwara, 1998) revolutionized clothing design and prefigured anxieties about the impermanence of fashion and its waste. Garments were woven in three dimensions on a continuous tube, using computerized whole-thread knitting technology.
The garment came in a cylinder and was later cut by the holder – there was no waste, as the remaining parts became gloves, for example.
Miyake and men
Miyake’s 1991 pneumatic collection included men’s pants with plastic bladders and straws—men could inflate or deflate the clothes to fit.
It was the era of the AIDS crisis and the loss of the body. Calvin Klein responded with hyper-masculine underwear and hyper-masculine advertising. Miyake, on the other hand, tested the zeitgeist by suggesting that we use clothes to make our bodies and appearances fit our needs.
Having worn his clothes myself for some time now, I can attest to the relief they provide. Jackets are unlined and hug the body in unexpected ways. Sleeves can be made to create a temple shape on your arm and add dynamism to the body. The color palette is incredible and so different from a wool or tweed diet.
The computer-generated jacquard weave creates subtle patterns registered only by looking closely. Textiles have an unexpected touch next to the skin. Some of the outfits are literally rolled up into a ball. They weigh almost nothing, which means they free the traveler. Once unfolded and put into the body, they come back to life.
There is a real sense that you, the wearer, bring these inanimate things to life: clothing is a performance, and clothes generate a reality that is both theatrical and practical. Although widely worn (there is a cliché that all gallerists have once lived in Miyake), people remain intrigued by them, wanting to touch them themselves.
At the Issey Miyake Retrospective in Tokyo in 2016, I saw Miyake and I really wanted to go and thank him for transforming the potential of fashion for women and men around the world, its material possibility and the possibility of imagination.
I would like to thank him very much for this now.
Reprinted from The Conversation
The writer is a Distinguished Professor of Design History at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Published in Dawn, ICON, August 21, 2022
