Issey Miyake

By Elaine Lies. TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese designer Issey Miyake, famed for his pleated style of clothing that never wrinkles and who produced the signature ...

In the late 1980s, he developed a new way of pleating by wrapping fabrics between layers of paper and putting them into a heat press, with the garments holding their pleated shape. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic." Miyake was born in Hiroshima and was seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city while he was in a classroom.

Japanese designer Issey Miyake, famed for his pleated style of clothing that never wrinkles and who produced the signature black turtleneck of friend and ...

In the late 1980s, he developed a new way of pleating by wrapping fabrics between layers of paper and putting them into a heat press, with the garments holding their pleated shape. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic." Miyake was born in Hiroshima and was seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city while he was in a classroom. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Issey Miyake, who built one of Japan's biggest fashion brands and was known for his boldly sculpted pleated pieces as well as Apple CEO Steve Jobs' black ...

Miyake kept his family life private, and survivors are not known. His brown top, which combined the Japanese sewn fabric “sashiko” with raw silk knit, was splashed on the cover of the September 1973 issue of Elle magazine. 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.

After surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a child, Miyake turned to clothes as a modern, optimistic form of creativity, and revived the use of ...

And the first 15 years of his atelier's production is captured in a lavishly cool monograph, Issey Miyake & Miyake Design Studio 1970-1985 (Works Words Years) (1985). A landmark retrospective of his workwas held at the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2016, covering 45 years of his design work. As well as the Met, his clothes are held by insitutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Denver Art Museum, where pieces by Miyake and Yamamoto are hung alongside Japanese traditional garments. Miyake handed over the running of his business, which had expanded into fragrances—including L'eau d'Issey—and other merchandise, to others in 1997, to focus on research into new fabrics and production techniques, fuelled by his interest in the connection between technology and creativity. In 2009, Miyake, who had long been reluctant to be labelled "the designer who survived the atomic bomb", wrote a powerful op-ed articleon his experience for the New York Times, in which he encouraged then-US president Barack Obama to visit the city to demonstrate his commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. Miyake made another kind of headline when he supplied what became a trademark polyester-cotton turtleneck to the co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, a piece of clothing that became as much of a brand marker for the biggest tech company in the world as the bitten-apple logo and the curve of a corner on the iPhone. On a trip to Japan in the 1980s, Jobs had admired the practical chic of the grey uniforms worn by Sony workers, and that company's chief, Akio Morita, told him that Miyake had designed them. But Miyake, who did not care for the cost and impracticality of haute couture, brought this side of his work to the high street in 1993 with his Pleats Please clothes—now collectors' items—where heat-treated polyester was used to create genuinely unisex, permanently pleated, free-flowing, one-size-fits-all garments.

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 died at the age of 84 on August 5, 2022. His daring fashion design was matched by experimental retail architecture by Frank Gehry, ...

Throughout his career, Miyake maintained a close relationship with the design world through the architecture of his boutiques, and often took a chance on young practices. In the early 1970s, he worked with Shiro Kuramata, then an emerging furniture and interiors designer, on a retail space in Tokyo. In 1985, he commissioned a young David Chipperfield for his London boutique. In 1970, he founded the Miyake Design Studio. “Designing his shop on Sloane Street marked the beginning of my career,” Chipperfield wrote on Instagram in a remembrance of Miyake. “For three years afterwards, I traveled around Japan designing a series of little shops for him. The line originated from his belief in “style that would not be restricted to a particular age or profession, and which would be inspired by current aesthetics.” The pieces are comfortable enough to wear all day and hold their shape no matter how long they’ve been stuffed in a suitcase. The interior designer Rafael de Cardenas recently told Town & Country that wearing garments from Miyake’s Homme Plissé line is “a good way to look smart when you’re actually wearing sweatpants.” The designer conceived of garments the way an architect might: in terms of structure and volume, experimenting with material and manufacturing processes to help him reach his ultimate goal of making clothes that represented contemporary life, or as he said in 1999, “to try to bring answers to those who are asking themselves questions about our age and how we should live in it.” On August 5, Miyake died in Tokyo at the age of 84 due to liver cancer.

It is now common for fashion designers to show their work in art-world settings—the Metropolitan Museum of Art's fashion exhibitions are some of its most well- ...

“I was always interested in making clothing that is worn by people in the real world,” he once told the Telegraph. For the “A-POC” dresses, Miyake worked with the textile engineer Dai Fujiwara to program an industrial knitting machine that works with a large, uncut stream of fabric. “I am not really interested in clothing as a conceptual art form,” he told the New York Times in 1993. In 1996, Miyake launched the “Guest Artist Series” for his “Pleats Please” initiative. Institutions continued to take a vested interest in Miyake’s work throughout his career. “I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic,” he wrote in a 2009 New York Times essay. “The elements of fashion, of course, are there,” Ingrid Sischy and Germano Celant wrote in an editorial paired with the issue. His famed “Pleats Please” series, begun in 1993, is a grouping of polyester garments that can be folded up, so that they lie flat not unlike paintings. By the late ’70s, Miyake had begun to gather a loyal fanbase stateside. Miyake later attended the Tama Art University in Tokyo, where he studied graphic design and graduated in 1964. Miyake helped pave the way for that, however, and when his designs first gained art-world popularity in the 1980s, it was unusual from someone in the fashion world to have such crossover appeal. In 1982, Artforum featured an image of a model wearing a dress that was influenced by samurai practice armor.

PARIS FRANCE JUNE 20 Models walk the runway during the Homme Plisse Issey Miyake Men Menswear. PARIS, FRANCE - JUNE 20: Models walk the runway during the Homme ...

Sargent himself was initially drawn to the easiness of Homme Plissé garments. “I imagine it’s the sculptural quality of it that has long attracted artists and collectors and gallerists,” he says. “It’s really sort of extraordinary, that it has gone from this cult Japanese thing that Grace Jones wore in the ’90s, and art women of a certain age wore, to this phenomenon in men’s fashion,” he says.