Japanese designer Issey Miyake, the man who modernised pleats and fashioned paper, wire and plastic into cult and contemporary clothing, died on 5 August aged 84 from liver cancer. Dana Thomas, who interviewed him many times over the course of his career, reflects on his life and legacy.
Issey Miyake was fashion’s true futurist. The Japanese designer, who died from cancer this week in Tokyo at the age of 84, researched, experimented, and innovated to push design forward and make it as democratic possible. He achieved this by combining high-tech with traditional design. As he once told me: “I am always thinking of tomorrow.”
This obsession was born in Paris, where he began his career in the mid-1960s. Miyake, who as a child survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, studied at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture – the school that produced Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, and Valentino Garavani – and he apprenticed in the studios of Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. During those formative years, Miyake mastered the classic tailoring and draping of couture, to create beautiful, one-of-a-kind clothes for the wealthy elite. But when he was caught up in the French student riots of 1968, he experienced an epiphany of sorts. “I questioned everything,” he told me. “I said, ‘I am a liar’.” He later told me for an article in WSJ magazine in 2012: “I realised that the future was in making clothing for the many, not the few. I wanted to make clothing that was as universal as jeans and T-shirts.”
And with that, he dedicated his life to designing fashion for everyone, rooted in couture and produced with technology. Like Pleats Please, his wildly successful line of tightly pleated clothes, inspired by the togas of Ancient Greece and the Fortuny gowns of 19th century Venice. Instead of silk, Miyake used polyester, and instead of hand-folding and seaming, he pleated the fabric with a heat press. In 2018, I visited his laboratory in Tokyo and made my own scarlet Pleats Please scarf on the machine – it took less than a minute. This, I thought, was modern, democratic fashion.
Next came A Piece of Cloth – A-POC for short – a seamless fabric woven on an industrial knitting machine from a single thread into a tubular shape, like a stocking, that the wearer could refashion with scissors without unravelling the hems. I remember the show at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1999, when Miyake introduced A-POC to the world: models padded down the runway, dressed in a long A-POC tube, like a caterpillar. Sometime after, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired an A-POC item – the first industrially produced fashion item in its permanent collection.
In 2010, Miyake introduced 132 5. Issey Miyake, a new design concept as expressed by its title: one piece of fabric, a three-dimensional shape reduced to two, and the fifth dimension a garment enters when it is worn. There are no seams – shapes and darts are made by sharp creases and folds, like origami, based on computer formulas. When folded, the clothes are in flat geometric shapes, like swirls. Unfolded, they are boxy 3-D dresses, blouses, and pants. “These clothes are very light, like air, and are season-less,” Miyake told me at the collection’s unveiling at Galerie kreo on the Left Bank. “I hope people will keep them a long time, and not replace them every two months. That, for me, is the essence of sustainability.”
Miyake was democratic in other ways, too. In the early 1980s, he cast models who were only 5ft7ins or 5ft8ins, unlike the towering catwalk mannequins of the era, like Jerry Hall, Iman, and Dalma. (This was a decade before the relatively petite Kate Moss arrived on the scene.) In 1996, he tapped six women who were over the age of 60 to walk in his show at the Carrousel du Louvre, including a 91-year-old retired dancer and a 68-year-old psychiatrist his assistant had spotted in a Japanese restaurant.
Miyake’s favourite client back then was Gerry Gischia, a 93-year-old retired couturier. “I’ve met so many wonderful men and women who, while they would be categorised as older… have more of a lust for life than the youth,” he told me at the show. “In the field of clothing design, there is a tendency to look up to the young. What is totally being ignored is that clothing is for everyone… I feel that it is our responsibility to design for everyone, and for all generations.”
In 1991, Miyake designed costumes for the choreographer William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt. He made Apple founder Steve Jobs’s signature black turtlenecks. (Jobs would order them in their hundreds.) He dressed jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, operatic soprano Jessye Norman and rocker Mick Jagger for concerts. During the “Making Things” exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris in 1998, I watched with Miyake as his friend, the Chinese artist Cai Guo- Qiang, poured gunpowder onto Pleats Please dresses, trousers and T-shirts, lit the fuses, and blew up the clothes, leaving burn marks on the fabric in the shape of dragons. “When I make something, it’s only half finished,” Miyake later said. “When people use it – for years and years – then it is finished.”
This article was originally published on Vogue UK.
