Issey Miyake
Issey Miyake was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and was seven years old when the atomic bomb fell. He rarely discussed this fact publicly, and when he did, it was to insist that he did not wish to be defined by it — that he chose to think of things that can be created rather than things that were destroyed. This refusal to be reduced to biography, this insistence that the work speak for itself and speak forward rather than backward, governed his entire career. He studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964, then moved to Paris, where he worked in the ateliers of Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy before spending time in New York. He returned to Japan in 1970, established his design studio in Tokyo, and began showing at Paris Fashion Week in 1973 — nearly a decade before Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto would make their own Paris debuts, and in this temporal priority lies an essential truth about Miyake’s role in fashion history: he was the pathfinder, the designer who first demonstrated that Japanese aesthetics could not merely participate in Western fashion but fundamentally transform it.
His stated ambition was to create a new fashion genre that was neither Japanese nor Western, and this required rethinking garments from the surface down to their fundamental relationship with the body. Where European fashion began with the body and cut fabric to conform to it, Miyake began with fabric and explored what it could do when freed from the body’s dictation. His early “layered and wrapped” designs introduced Japanese construction principles to the Western fashion establishment: garments that were not tailored but draped, not fitted but folded, not structured by darts and seams but by the intrinsic properties of the material itself. This was not anti-fashion in the confrontational sense that Kawakubo and Yamamoto would later pursue. It was an alternative fashion, a parallel system of making that operated from different premises and arrived at different conclusions about what a garment could be.
The most significant of those conclusions was Pleats Please, launched as a standalone line in 1993 after several years of development, and the innovation that Miyake himself considered his most valuable contribution to design. The process had no precedent: garments were constructed at two to three times their intended size, then sandwiched between layers of paper and fed through a heat press that permanently set the pleats. The result was lightweight, wrinkle-resistant, packable, washable clothing that maintained its form through wear and travel with a resilience that conventional fabrics could not match. The innovation was structural as much as aesthetic — it changed the garment’s relationship to time, to use, to the circumstances of daily life. A Pleats Please dress could be rolled into a ball, stuffed into a suitcase, pulled out at the destination, and worn immediately, and it would look exactly as it was intended to look. This was fashion as engineering, garment as technology, and it anticipated by decades the fashion industry’s broader turn toward technical materials and functional design.
The subsequent A-POC project — A Piece of Cloth — developed with Dai Fujiwara and launched in 1999, pushed the technological investigation further. Using a single thread fed into a computer-programmed knitting machine, A-POC produced complete garments in one continuous process, with the wearer cutting them from the fabric tube to create their own customized pieces. The concept anticipated 3D knitting and on-demand manufacturing by more than two decades, and it embodied Miyake’s most radical proposition: that the act of dressing could be collaborative, that the designer’s role was not to dictate form but to create the conditions within which form could emerge through the wearer’s own choices.
Miyake’s philosophy was radically democratic in a way that distinguished him from the more austere, more deliberately difficult work of his Japanese contemporaries. He wanted beautiful, comfortable, affordable, practical garments that transcended gender, size, race, and age. The Pleats Please line achieved this ambition with remarkable consistency, producing garments that were sold at prices accessible to a far wider audience than most designer fashion, without sacrificing the originality or intelligence that governed every aspect of their conception. In 2006, he became the first fashion designer to receive the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy — a recognition that situated his work alongside scientists, philosophers, and artists in other disciplines, and that confirmed what the garments themselves had been arguing since the 1970s: that the design of clothing is not a lesser art but a practice that engages with the same questions of form, material, and human experience that preoccupy the most serious thinkers in any field.
His contribution to the broader Japanese avant-garde movement is structural as well as temporal. By showing in Paris from 1973, by building an international reputation for Japanese design before Kawakubo and Yamamoto arrived, Miyake created the conditions of possibility for the 1981 shock — the audience that received those collections, hostile as much of its reaction was, had already been primed by a decade of Miyake’s work to understand that Japanese fashion could operate at the highest level of ambition and execution. His death on August 5, 2022, at the age of eighty-four, was mourned across the fashion world, but the grief was complicated by the recognition that his legacy was not in danger of being forgotten. The Pleats Please line continues in production. The A-POC concept continues to generate new developments. And the question he spent fifty years investigating — how can technology liberate the body rather than constrain it, how can a garment be both engineered and free — remains the most important question that fashion has yet to fully answer.