Earlier this week, the world learned of the loss of Issey Miyake – the “designer’s designer”, “master of folding” and advocate of “clothes for living” – at the age of 84. In keeping with Miyake’s wishes, no public service will be held. It’s a quiet end for a shy man whose innovations were decades ahead of their time and whose work shows how craftsmanship, technology, open-minded thinking and experimentation can push the boundaries of design.
Emulating the movement and fluidity of the human body, Miyake’s designs subverted the dimensions and materials traditionally associated with fashion. His work transcended not only proportion and form, but also gender, size and age. From Steve Jobs’ sartorial black collar and Zaha Hadid’s wildly oversized outerwear to the uniforms of Sony factory workers in Japan, Miyake’s designs became ubiquitous among innovators and creators of all stripes. As design editor Diana Budds commented, “There’s a stereotype that the uniform of the design world is all black. But more aspirationally, it’s everything Issey Miyake.”
Miyake, who was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and survived the atomic bomb seven years later, was educated in graphic design at Tama Art University. Miyake fell in love with design in part through his exposure to Isamu Noguchi’s two bridges in downtown Hiroshima—a memorial to Hiroshima’s victims—which he called “the spiritual support of the people.” He went on to study tailoring in Paris in 1965 and founded the Miyake Design Studio soon after in 1970. Miyake’s marriage of traditional Japanese crafts and technological experimentation allowed him to challenge the limitations of two-dimensional clothing and introduce architectural concepts into his work. As his designs became known internationally, Miyake published his seminal book East meets West in 1978 and became the first Asian designer to show at Paris Fashion Week.
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His impressive career took off in the 1980s when he pioneered and patented the microfleece textile he is best known for today. Made from ultra-fine polyester, the fabric featured waterfalls of crisp accordion pleats that echoed the comfort of loungewear and retained their shape after washing, drying and creasing. As the style grew in critical acclaim, Miyake launched his Pleats Please collection in 1993 (and later, in 2013, the male counterpart Homme Plissé), which, to this day, is the brand’s most successful venture. Pleats Please have no closures, silhouettes or low-cut necklines, as the free-flowing textile seeks to free the human body from inhibition.
In 1983, Miyake displayed a number of his textile innovations—including unorthodox materials such as rattan and reinforced plastic—at his major exhibition Issey Miyake: Body Works in Tokyo. It was one of the first exhibitions in Asia to show fashion as an art form, and his clothing continued to challenge the limitations of fashion by penetrating the worlds of science and design. For example, in 1998, he founded A Piece of Cloth (A-POC), a line of machine-knit clothing from a single yarn. The fabric had different lines of demarcation; after cutting, it could produce a dress, a hat—any garment imaginable—as well as a cover for Ron Arad’s figure-eight Ripple chair. Known as the “A-POC Trampoline”, the collaboration was showcased at Milan’s annual Salone del Mobile design conference in 2006.
As Miyake’s fashion brand continued to break into the design space, it opened doors to new designers: in 1974, for example, Miyake commissioned then-emerging talent Shiro Kuramata for the brand’s first retail location in Tokyo, later hired to create the bottle for his perfume. Starchitect David Chipperfield also caught Miyake’s eye early: In 1985, the British architect was hired to create Miyake’s boutique in London. As Chipperfield wrote in his Instagram post commemorating Miyake, “Designing his store on Sloane Street marked the beginning of my career. For the next three years, I traveled around Japan designing a series of small shops for him. It was a fundamental, formative part of my design experience.”
Although the fashion titan is best known for his couture brand, Miyake married science and sculpture in his work, and his technology-driven textiles and iconoclastic styles will have a lasting impact on the design world. Miyake was more than a designer—he was an architect, an engineer, and a humanitarian whose hallmarks redefined the possibilities of materiality and form.
