Issey Miyake

Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has died aged 84, an employee at his office in Tokyo told AFP ...

TOKYO (Aug 9): Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has died aged 84, an employee at his office in ...

Among his inventions were the “Pleats Please” line, permanently pleated items which do not crease, the futuristic triangles of his “Bao Bao” bag, and his “A-POC (A Piece Of Cloth)” concept — using computers to cut whole garments with no seams. “I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day,” Miyake wrote in the New York Times in 2009. “He died on the evening of August 5,” she said over the telephone, without giving further details of his death and declining to be named.

Miyake defined an era in Japan's modern history, reaching stardom in the 1970s with his origami-like pleats that transformed usually crass polyester into ...

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was a star as soon as he hit the European runways. Miyake kept his family life private, and survivors are not known. His down-to-earth clothing was meant to celebrate the human body regardless of race, build, size or age.

Issey Miyake, a cutting-edge fashion designer, died at age 84 in Tokyo. Miyake is known for his innovative pleating technology and for creating the black ...

Straight legs of trousers and flat lines on jackets fill with buoyancy and movement — the clothes, above all, are meant to reflect life. Miyake and his team had developed an innovative method of treating fabric in the ‘80s that created permanent rows of micro pleats that withstand folding, washing machines, and being jammed into suitcases (trust me). The two-dimensional flatness of the garments is in line with how Miyake conceived of clothing, art, and technology. But he kept his own consistent outfit, with Miyake supplying hundreds of identical shirts. “Clothing is the closest thing to all humans.” Candy-colored clothes hung like streaks of paint against the perfectly white laminated walls.

The pioneering Japanese designer leaves behind a legacy of innovative fashion design.

In 1999, he introduced the A-POC range, a return to his original A Piece of Cloth concept. When I studied fashion history in the 2000s it was as if it only existed in London, Paris, Milan and New York but this “new wave” of Japanese designers paved the way for other international designers to follow. This is evident in his many innovations, especially in the way he blended his Japanese heritage with his European and North American experiences. He was celebrated for clothing that responded to the body in movement and which was conceptual in design but also completely appropriate for the everyday. There’s much for the next generation of fashion designers to learn from Miyake’s body of work, from his innovative reinvention of Japanese clothing traditions to his bravery in embracing new textile technologies and silhouettes. He witnessed the revolutionary May 1968 protests in Paris, a series of student and worker demonstrations that resulted in improved workers’ rights and rapid social change.

On the unfortunate demise of the Japanese fashion designer, contemporaries Yves Béhar and Tokujin Yoshioka reminisce their fond memories of working ...

At that time, I made a hat using a transparent silicon material that I discovered or a ring-shaped sculptural bag, and I presented them to Issey-san. He thought they were interesting, and I began to engage in the kind of spatial work that Shiro Kuramata was doing, such as installation work for exhibitions and store design. Every day was a trial-and-error process, and the days I immersed myself in creating things until late at night were a precious experience for me.” Mr Miyake and his team gave us a complete license to create freely at the intersection of design and poetry. Working for Miyake in the retail store, A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, Tokujin Yoshioka created a futuristic aesthetic within a vernacular building typology in Kyoto. Sharing his stories on Miyake, Tokujin Yoshioka says, “When I was 20 years old, Issey-san was looking for someone who is not from the fashion field but who could create sculptural forms. However, he translated his experiences into his creations as a celebration of life and explored the freedom of movement. As he evolved his approach and work, he transformed the line into a practical, wearable and trendy design that has proven to be timeless.

Before Jobs adopted his classic black turtleneck, he approached Japanese designer Issey Miyake to see if he could create a uniform for Apple employees.

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The real beginning of the fashion-technology love affair and its legacy lies with Issey Miyake, who died last week.

It was an approach to dress later adopted by adherents including Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. Also his ability to blend soft-corner elegance and utility in not just his own style but the style of his products. Still, according to Mr. Isaacson’s book, the two men became friends, and Mr. Jobs would often visit Mr. Miyake, ultimately adopting a Miyake garment — the black mock turtleneck — as a key part of his own uniform. Mr. Miyake made him “like a hundred of them,” Mr. Jobs, who wore them until his death in 2011, said in the book. (An updated version was reintroduced in 2017 as “The Semi-Dull T.”) According to Mr. Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs,” Mr. Jobs was fascinated by the uniform jacket Mr. Miyake created for Sony workers in 1981. At that point, the whole ethos of the garment had been transformed. And then there was 132 5, which Mr. Miyaki debuted in 2010 (after he had stepped back from his day-to-day responsibilities but remained involved with his brand). Inspired by the work of computer scientist Jun Mitani, it comprised flat-pack items in complex origami folds that popped open to create three-dimensional pieces on the body. But it was his understanding and appreciation of technology and how it could be harnessed to an aesthetic point of view to create new, seductive utilities that set Mr. Miyake apart. So it went: Next came an experiment involving a continuous piece of thread fed into an industrial knitting machine to create one piece of cloth with inbuilt seams that traced different garment shapes — which could in turn be cut out as desired by the wearer, thus eliminating manufacturing detritus. By 1994, those garments made up a line of their own known as Pleats Please (later spun into a men’s wear version, Homme Plissé): a re-engineering of the classic Grecian drapes of Mario Fortuny into something both practical and weirdly fun. But it embodies his founding principles and serves as the door through which anyone not particularly interested in fashion could walk to discover the Miyake universe. He was the original champion of fashion tech.