“SSENSE,” he said, like a statement.
“Yes,” I said, holding the delicate material with a pinch.
Some clichés never stop earning their status. We are all, it’s true, cut from the same cloth. But that cloth is different when it’s an Issey Miyake cloth. In her Miyake obituary for Curbed, Diana Budds wisely wrote there is “a stereotype that the design world’s uniform is anything black. But more aspirationally, it’s anything Issey Miyake.”
Miyake was the master of turning something that could feel old — cut from the same cloth — into something truer and newer. His love for clothes was the kind of constructive sleight of hand that makes genius feel as natural as nudity.
Miyake had wanted to be a dancer as a child, and in 1991, he made the costumes for William Forsythe’s ballet The Loss of Small Detail. It was an early attempt at shaping pleating around the body’s movements. The puzzle of how different materials could be incorporated into a collaborative effort subsequently became his life’s work. In Rachel Tashjian’s words, he “thought obsessively, happily, about freedom, about what experimentation and even rebellion could invite.”
A famous anecdote: in 1981, Miyake designed uniforms for Sony as part of a tribute for their thirty-fifth anniversary, consisting of a jacket made of ripstop nylon that easily converted into a vest. When Steve Jobs visited the factory, he liked the look of the uniforms so much that he tried to commission Miyake to make a vest for Apple employees, who really didn’t want to wear them. Their loss. Jobs relented, but kept the idea for himself. Miyake’s black turtlenecks became Jobs’s personal uniform. When he passed away, in 2011, his closet had “like a hundred of them” — enough, Jobs once poignantly said, “to last for the rest of my life.” Miyake stopped producing the turtlenecks after Jobs died.
Miyake maintained professional and personal relationships with all sorts of people. He made dresses for ballerinas, technocrats, architects, and assistants. He designed uniforms for the Lithuanian Olympic team in 1992, shortly after they declared independence from the Soviet Union. His line 132 5., a range of two-dimensional items that unfolded to be three-dimensional when worn, was influenced by Jun Mitani, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who specializes in crafting geometric modeling and origami with computer software. For the Guest Artist series that ran between 1996 and 1998, Miyake invited contemporary artists to work with Pleats Please as if it were any other material. Miyake saw everything as a collaboration: nothing was done until it was worn. “When I make something, it’s only half-finished,” he explained. “When people use it — for years and years — then it is finished.” (...)
I am, like so many others, most enamored with the line Pleats Please. Every item is composed of a series of pleats so fine they resemble blades of grass, a plissé technique made perfect with a heat press. The pleats were inspired by the Fortuny gowns of the early 1900s, sometimes called Delphos gowns after the statue Charioteer of Delphi, lending mythological meaning to what became for some an everyday item. Most astoundingly, the clothes could be machine washed. After decades in which advanced domestic technology was kept far away from objects of value — i.e., never putting your favorite pants in the washing machine — Pleats Please garments proved to be the rare item that could be special without being fragile.
In 1998, Miyake said that the present was “a bit behind.” It’s a fair assessment. Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself, even as there is a relentless churn between romanticizing the old and reifying the new. The only counter to the cynicism of today’s luxury market is a good sense of humor, which is to say, a certain stamina for constant ego death. You are always looking at photos of yourself from not too long ago, shaking your head, preparing to say the phrase we use to distance ourselves from who we once were: What was I thinking? In Miyake’s clothes, though, we can be saved from this embarrassment. It’s hard to explain why some trends come and go while others remain as elemental as Pleats Please. I can only cite another cliché with a slight variation: we know it when we wear it.
I bought my first pair of Pleats Please pants after many, many discussions with my peers who were better versed in the sizing than I was. When they arrived in the mail I touched them as carefully as I would anything precious, then wore them to go grocery shopping. I now own two shirts as well, and a skirt will follow as soon as I have the money. These items are not what most people would consider affordable, but they are what anyone can recognize as valuable. They are not exactly practical, but they are worn so easily. They are a marvel. (...)
Miyake had wanted to be a dancer as a child, and in 1991, he made the costumes for William Forsythe’s ballet The Loss of Small Detail. It was an early attempt at shaping pleating around the body’s movements. The puzzle of how different materials could be incorporated into a collaborative effort subsequently became his life’s work. In Rachel Tashjian’s words, he “thought obsessively, happily, about freedom, about what experimentation and even rebellion could invite.”
A famous anecdote: in 1981, Miyake designed uniforms for Sony as part of a tribute for their thirty-fifth anniversary, consisting of a jacket made of ripstop nylon that easily converted into a vest. When Steve Jobs visited the factory, he liked the look of the uniforms so much that he tried to commission Miyake to make a vest for Apple employees, who really didn’t want to wear them. Their loss. Jobs relented, but kept the idea for himself. Miyake’s black turtlenecks became Jobs’s personal uniform. When he passed away, in 2011, his closet had “like a hundred of them” — enough, Jobs once poignantly said, “to last for the rest of my life.” Miyake stopped producing the turtlenecks after Jobs died.
Miyake maintained professional and personal relationships with all sorts of people. He made dresses for ballerinas, technocrats, architects, and assistants. He designed uniforms for the Lithuanian Olympic team in 1992, shortly after they declared independence from the Soviet Union. His line 132 5., a range of two-dimensional items that unfolded to be three-dimensional when worn, was influenced by Jun Mitani, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who specializes in crafting geometric modeling and origami with computer software. For the Guest Artist series that ran between 1996 and 1998, Miyake invited contemporary artists to work with Pleats Please as if it were any other material. Miyake saw everything as a collaboration: nothing was done until it was worn. “When I make something, it’s only half-finished,” he explained. “When people use it — for years and years — then it is finished.” (...)
I am, like so many others, most enamored with the line Pleats Please. Every item is composed of a series of pleats so fine they resemble blades of grass, a plissé technique made perfect with a heat press. The pleats were inspired by the Fortuny gowns of the early 1900s, sometimes called Delphos gowns after the statue Charioteer of Delphi, lending mythological meaning to what became for some an everyday item. Most astoundingly, the clothes could be machine washed. After decades in which advanced domestic technology was kept far away from objects of value — i.e., never putting your favorite pants in the washing machine — Pleats Please garments proved to be the rare item that could be special without being fragile.
In 1998, Miyake said that the present was “a bit behind.” It’s a fair assessment. Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself, even as there is a relentless churn between romanticizing the old and reifying the new. The only counter to the cynicism of today’s luxury market is a good sense of humor, which is to say, a certain stamina for constant ego death. You are always looking at photos of yourself from not too long ago, shaking your head, preparing to say the phrase we use to distance ourselves from who we once were: What was I thinking? In Miyake’s clothes, though, we can be saved from this embarrassment. It’s hard to explain why some trends come and go while others remain as elemental as Pleats Please. I can only cite another cliché with a slight variation: we know it when we wear it.
I bought my first pair of Pleats Please pants after many, many discussions with my peers who were better versed in the sizing than I was. When they arrived in the mail I touched them as carefully as I would anything precious, then wore them to go grocery shopping. I now own two shirts as well, and a skirt will follow as soon as I have the money. These items are not what most people would consider affordable, but they are what anyone can recognize as valuable. They are not exactly practical, but they are worn so easily. They are a marvel. (...)
Issey Miyake helped me reconcile myself to the hypocrisy and compromise that form around caring how you look. His designs allowed me to love clothes, and love them to a fault, without feeling like I had to capitulate to something that had nothing really to say. Miyake’s clothes, in other words, do not make your butt look good. (...)
Miyake apparently once said that he made “clothes,” not “fashion,” and I think it’s important to recognize that his work was not simply concept or art: it took a resounding physical form, and that mattered. Its gestures were assured, not ironic jokes. And if his designs were not useful in the way a push-up bra is useful, it was to challenge the conception of design that centers what we want from things rather than how things can use us. Miyake’s clothes, in their billows and points and general ill-fittingness — as well as in their material investigations — leave a legacy of us not looking our best. Instead, they suggest what fashion can do beyond flattery, as well as what desires are worth falling for.
by Hannah Baer, Nicole Lipman, Haley Mlotek, Su Wu, N+1 | Read more:
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