Issey Miyake (Q1003)
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Japanese fashion brand
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Issey Miyake |
Japanese fashion brand |
Statements
2000
Creative Director
Creative Director
Consideration abounded at Issey Miyake this morning. The park-set pavilion location was both a short walk from the immediately-before, way-out-of-town Loewe show, and also finely appropriate for the collection. The round stools used for seating were cut from compressed cylinders of paper, ready for recycling, that are a byproduct of the core Miyake pleating process whose commercial appeal is so powerfully enduring.These seats were a gesture to preface a collection that leafed through several series of looks conceived around paper. The opening shrouded outfits emerged to the sound of dripping water: the oozing curves of the internally-fastened draping and wet-look gleam on the semi-transparent fabric was meant, you guessed, to reflect the look of damp paper. Next was a sextet of looks in taupe, white or black in a material whose mix of washi (hemp paper) and silk-rayon were shot with stretch yarn: this allowed Satoshi Kondo to craft fold-detailed silhouettes that were both angular and flexible, and whose surface retained the dimpled texture of traditional Japanese hemp paper.Hemp-mix knits were used to build looks in irregularly segmented sections of jumbled tone and texture. Stiffish woven hemp fabric was built into tailoring with silhouettes much more defined. Single piece pleated looks were twisted around the models into body-wrappings: some twirled or stretched against the garments as they walked to demonstrate their springy, elastic cling.There were a few gentle paper-related gags written in. One look was decorated with crocodile clips, and there was a paper bag handbag whose yarn integrated washi. Pressed leaf and flower eyewear and hat brims or masks preceded a beautiful series of wrinkled silk looks decorated with pressed floral prints. Delicacy and impact combined in a collection that left a beguiling imprint.
27 September 2024
Before the clothes, the frescoes. For this Issey Miyake show, we were in a building that has since 2007 served as France’s Museum of Immigration History. That rebranding rightly flips the space’s original purpose: Built in the late 1920s, it was named the Museum of Colonialism, and in 1931 it received 8 million visitors during an international exhibition dedicated to showcasing the nation’s global colonial interests.The presentation was held in its central forum, which is decorated by 600 square meters of frescoes painted by Pierre-Henri Ducos de la Haille. These depict France as a heroic female character swathed in imperial red, surrounded by the galleons and frigates of global commerce that connect to her many “dependencies” across five continents. As we waited for the show to start, it was fascinating to scan this spectacular anachronistic monument.Then the clothes sailed forth to conquer. Titled What Has Always Been, Satoshi Kondo’s collection contemplated clothing beyond history or style, but instead as deeply and intuitively engrained human habit. There were elements to it that seemed almost metaphysical, like the fluted flowerlike apertures that framed all five extremities of the body in the opening few looks. Pieces that sprouted sleeves from ankles to arms appeared to have grown spontaneously around the body, as if it were the garment rather than the wearer that had agency. Carefully draped ensembles in layers of square fabric suggested imagined paleoanthropological archetypes of self-protection, as we imagine Stone Age humans swathing themselves in skins and pelts before the advent of weaving.Sometimes the brimmed visors worn above headscarfs over Kondo’s poetically draped pieces in technologically advanced Miyake fabrics engendered a romantically nomadic air: They hinted at waves of human movement long predating the magnificent discredited propaganda on the paintings around us. The powerfully colored draped pleated looks near the finale triggered a similar association and also vaguely recalled the magnificent Bene Gesserit costumes in the original David Lynch adaptation ofDune(so, so superior to the lumpen remakes).The color curation was gorgeous at times. At others, Kondo kept his palette spare and bare in off-white looks whose sections billowed with human movement as you imagined those galleons’ sailcloths straining in the trade winds. When the pattern came, it was captivating.
The design team apparently took a selection of native Japanese flowers and herb leaves to which they applied paint to create the outlines, which were later defined by felting. There seemed no botanical veracity to the results, but they were beautiful. This was a wonderful collection presented in an uncomfortable but important space. Both subject and context provided a salutary reminder that things that seem eternal in the present never quite work out that way in the future.
1 March 2024
Props (and thanks) toVoguecolleague José Criales-Unzueta, who after this show noted and posted to his Instagram a runway redux of Issey Miyake’s Spring 1998showwritten by Laird Borrelli-Persson. As you can see by comparing the galleries, Miyake’s “tube veils” from that year were riffed on—and extended into real veils—by Satoshi Kondo at this morning’s show in Paris. That was one of Miyake’s final shows as creative director: following his death last summer, the Miyake family continues to hold the candle for their founder.This tribute, which felt as fresh and exciting to the eye as it must have 25 years ago, opened a beautiful collection. Kondo’s dynamic experiments with high twist yarns played against the bodies beneath them in a manner comparable to the fluttering of a flag in the breeze, an image that the designer cited as a starting point. At points of movement, hips and shoulders, the fabric found its own volume and settled into a natural, unenforced drape created by the human weather within it.A series of prints showing grainy shafts of light were developed from exposed film, another 1990s throwback. Then we saw painstakingly fashioned dresses cut from single tubes of washi paper and polyester mix that were manipulated to fold back and forth around subtle cut-out sections: these were both highly technical and deeply romantic. The models sometimes wore Vibram-soled barefoot running shoes by New Balance in Kondo directed colorways.Some large-silhouette jackets and coats appeared so considerable thanks to the way in which the front and back facing pieces of material were placed flat against each other around the edge of the front-facing physical facade: this was a little reminiscent of last season’s collection, and retained an impressive combination of substance and lightness. The soundsystem played a bassline so heavy and loud that the pieces of washi paper hanging across the runway turned and trembled as the models walked breezily by.
29 September 2023
To the smooth yet slightly unsettling marimba sounds of the SR9 trio (who could make a great Wes Anderson montage score) this Issey Miyake show was presented onstage at the Théâtre du Châtelet. To say it sometimes fell flat is no negative potshot: Satoshi Kondo’s collection was entitled The Square and Beyond and in some phases was reminiscent of fall 2012’s purposefully 2D Commes des Garçons collection.Taking the square as a starting point he began by inserting his models into diamond-orientation square garments—color-blocked high pants, shirting, and a romper—which were then folded to create ceremonially priestly shoulders and waistlines. Then he blended white-edged black square knit panels (stretched for 90 degree properness by warp and weft and their positioning on the bodies within them) against satin-sheen viscose shirts and uppers. This phase then moved into a green and white colorway, accessorized by drooping square-brimmed hats and square-clad handbags. Next up was a check phase that relished how mixed material fabrics whose elements responded differently to heat shrunk irregularly to create a 3D puckered finish in abstracted blanket like patterns.Knit top-to-toe looks contained forms that were elevated, fin like, off the body by the tension in their construction. Gathered plissé dresses created a Bridget Riley-esque dazzle of pattern that undulated around the forms inhabiting them. Wide-lapeled coats in what looked like fuzzy orange Casentino cloth were followed by a series of Mondrian-adjacent ribbed pieces featuring blown up angular panels of color and black and white. Kondo began with geometry’s go-to normcore symmetrical building block then pulled it here, pushed it there, and turned the square into something much more stimulatingly strange to consider.
3 March 2023
[Editor’s note: This collection was originally presented on October 15, 1997, in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, and the photos have been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document historical fashion shows.]Issey Miyake’s spring 1998 collection opens with a “Look, ma, no hands!” moment. Barefoot models appear wrapped in stretch dresses with no armholes. Words likemummyorbondagemight come to mind, but the soft tones of the clothes and the wispy hairstyles of the models suggested some sort of emergence or cocoons. Miyake, who was often inspired by dance, described the pieces as tube veils. “Fashion today,” he said in an interview withThe Gazetteat the time, “is the body seen through a film of translucent fabric—at once revealing and concealing.”It’s fitting that a piece from this collection was included in the “Manus x Machina” exhibition at the Costume Institute, as the clothes were as concerned with anatomy (knits were patterned to mimic or accentuate the female torso) as technology. Some pieces were created from computer-generated stocking (tubular) knits. Others, according toW Magazine,were “made of bias-cut linen sewn as a tube and folded at the hem, their inner layers shrink-treated to create two different textures.” This kind of push and pull was emblematic of Miyake’s hands-on and textile-based approach to fashion. “Design is not for philosophy—it’s for life,” he once said.In an interview withThe Observer,Miyake described the collection as a “prototype” that enabled A-POC (A Piece of Cloth), a concept of customizable modular dressing that was presented on the runway for spring 1998 at a show that closed with models appearing in a line of connected dresses that were then cut (disconnected) into single looks. “The idea was to find a way to reinvent the whole process of clothing manufacture,” Miyake said in that 1999Observerpiece. That same year, Miyake named Naoki Takizawa creative director of the company, after which he devoted all of his attention to textile development.
27 December 2022
This first Issey Miyake show since the founder’s death in August was preceded by a moment of remembrance. Under images of the great man’s portrait that were projected around us at the Paris Event Center was written one of his many quotes, which, like so many of his garments, was deceptively simple: “I believe there is hope in design. Design evokes surprise and joy in people.”Once the applause had faded we were left looking ahead. Satoshi Kondo and the design team, who had worked closely with Miyake until the end, provided a quote of their own: “We see design as a process driven by curiosity, built upon a comprehensive exploration—bringing joy, wonder, and hope to life, and of course with a touch of playfulness.” This collection, named A Form That Breathes, was evidence that Miyake’s unparalleled application of technological innovation in the pursuit of joyfulness through design was in safe hands.Team Miyake tends to deliver its looks in groups, like different courses in a tasting menu, each focusing on its various avenues of seasonal exploration. The collection was loosely based around sculpture and the opening section, Torso, was crafted in single pieces of fabric manufactured to look solid to the eye—like a piece of carved marble—but to move fluidly against the body. Some of these were impressed with pigment prints intended to reinforce that sculptural look.Possibly the most technologically significant section came from around Look 20. These “Resonant Suit” looks were made in a circularly-pleated polyester that was 100 percent plant based and created by a Miyake partner named Toray Industries Inc. A 100-percent-fossil-fuel-free polyester? This was a truly exciting development. From around Look 40 onwards, a group called Assemblage used different knitting techniques to create dresses, skirts and tops in tiered sections. These had that trademark Miyake bounce and flex—they looked both structured and effortless simultaneously.The models walked between two fabric obelisks, lit from within. You could see the sculpture reference but also half expected these to be props in acoup de theatrethat never arrived. In the end the models and some dancers who joined at the close performed a joyful honor guard for Miyake—a traditional display of the garments’ wearability—running hither and thither across the large darkened space before rushing as one towards the exit. Then Kondo came out to take some deserved applause of his own.
30 September 2022
Writing over email from Tokyo after we missed our Zoom window because Coperni decided to have its could-have-been-in-any-big-room show way beyond the Parispériphérique(like, why?), Issey Miyake’s designer Satoshi Kondo reported: “Through this collection, I want to focus on the beauty of nature, and discover the untamed nature of a growing plant, including its roots growing in all directions, the stems growing from the ground into the sunlight. I wanted to create a collection that is lively, and to feel like the garments are alive and growing through their color, silhouette, and textures. The colors of this collection were created through natural colors of fruits and vegetables. The design team took real fruits and vegetables (i.e., beets, kiwis, oranges) and created juices to be inspired by their beautiful colors to create the color palette of this collection.”Entitled Sow It and Let It Grow, this collection’s Yuichi Kodama–directed video did indeed present its outfits and models as fast-flourishing seedlings that sped from horizontal germination to wending growth up a spiral staircase: They were then digitally replicated as they spread across a trellis of elevated walkways. Subsoil monochrome dresses and separates featured irregularly contoured panels of plissé recycled polyester yarn shaped to echo the thrusting chaos of root systems. Flatly foldable seamless knit pieces in a series named Rhizome included frond-like extraneous sleeves for leaving loose or wrapping around the body like a sun-seeking jasmine plant. Tie-dyed dresses created in pods of pleating connected by Kyoto artisans using the shiborizome technique were meant to resemble pea pods. Dye prints of sliced fruit pieces decorated three styles of suit and dress on cotton cupro.Less literally botanical were the garment-dyed brown and pink dresses whose bulbous shapes were achieved by sewing in circular panels of elastic that then shrunk and tautened during the dyeing. Coats in layered wool and cotton were patterned to abstractly mirror plant growth, and a closing trio of looks in rectangular panels of material attached with typical Miyake ingenuity were gently leaflike. This was a collection of finely pruned foliage that would be a pleasure to cultivate through the wearing.
5 March 2022
Issey Miyake is not especially associated with slinky dresses, but in this collection, designer Satoshi Kondo and his team dreamed up the ultimate Slinky dresses. Forward the film to exactly 4.00, and you will see them. The section is titled Link Rings, and the garments are made of eight connected circular sections of circular-pleated fabric, which are ingeniously fashioned to lie flat on the floor in an eminently packable way. Lift them up, though, and abracadabra—gravity’s pull coils them into full, fine, volumized garments.These were just one stand-out sight in a Miyake collection Kondo said was inspired by the sub-aquatic and titled “A Voyage in Descent.” “That’s a metaphor for the creative process,” he said via translator, “We always dig down in our process so the team can explore and discover many things they have never created before.”Another new territory Kondo and company explored this season was showcased in looks 35 through 37, and called Fluidity Loop. Put very simply, they followed the inspiration of the ocean’s organic forms to create a rib-knit whose ribs ran not straight, but in an arcing spiral. This circularity changed both the properties and the possibilities of the knit, allowing for simple-looking structural designs with minimal seaming and maximum bounce: really fantastic.Hand-painted in Kyoto, the early-run group of oversized pants, a skirt, and a one-shouldered dress were dried in a manner designed to create a glistening finish that was less evident in the film or images than to the eye. A middle-section group, this time printed with a technique named naki, designed to allow colors to bleed together and blend, looked sometimes floral but was based on undersea creatures. We resurfaced with a series of friendly anemone hats at the conclusion. This deep dive into the potential of fabric research to transform the possibilities of design was 360 degrees delightful, most especially those springily Slinky dresses and the strikingly spiralized knitwear.
1 October 2021
The season we are moving through has already seen a couple of interestingly progressive sci-fi flavored propositions. The idea of looking several seasons forward, instead of just a few months, seems especially smart right now. Today however, this collection gave a timely reminder that when it comes to floating beyond the realms of the contemporary, Issey Miyake is eternal.On a Zoom from Tokyo through his excellent translator, Satoshi Kondo said, “I wanted to integrate elements from nature as they are, and as we find them,” then added that he wanted to amplify these elements “through the technology, the idea, and the ingenuity” that has long been fostered within the house.While the result was not declaratively sci-fi—despite those fantastic circular cut-out pleated pieces being entitled Monochrome Planet—it was simultaneously otherworldly and timeless. To fanboy for a second, a parallel lurks in theStar Warssaga’s chronological setting being hundreds of years in the past, while its aesthetic and technological expression seems (even decades later) futuristic.Key pieces included dresses in squares of fabric whose monolith simplicity bent to the body via panels of elastic threading on the torso. Beautiful prints reminiscent of river-eroded stones were created through a 1,500-year-old dye-dropping technique calledsuminagashi(Kondo shared images of the making process on our Zoom) that originated in Fukui Prefecture. These were then used in a tight collection of smoothly silhouetted garments. Shirtdresses and trench-jumpsuits in raw wool and bulbously puckered looks in black—especially with that bathing cap—resembled the uniform issued to the crew of some chic vegan space mission: Goop x SpaceX. There were more earthbound pieces here too; in fact, this was a collection rooted in its earthiness, but as so often Miyake’s orbit was unique unto itself and unlike all else.
5 March 2021
“It was during the development of the collection when Kondo-san and the team were all working remotely, and as part of that were all sending packages to each other, that the idea developed,” said Issey Miyake designer Satoshi Kondo’s translator, Hugh, down the Zoom. “When we cannot meet each other physically, how do we connect, how do we express our thoughts in a small and compact package?”That idea developed into an excellent Miyake collection that was overflowing with ideas yet that could—at least as implied by the fun film that accompanied it—be folded to fit into a single drawer. Combining spatial economy with conceptual abundance, Kondo and company fashioned semi-rigid gilets and flowing, long-skirted biker jackets and matching pants that could be deconstructed by zipper. House-trademark pleated dresses and smocks and wide-gauge knits were expressed in the proprietary materials for which Miyake is rightly famed and shown not only in their colorfully expansive worn manifestations, but also unworn: Stop-motion footage showed them moving around in the manner of primeval microscopic organisms.Especially meta were the near-the-close clothes in attractive prints depicting scenes of interior decor. Models wore these interiors attractively on their exteriors before we again received demonstration of how they could be rolled and folded away to barely anything at all. Garments act as the membrane between the body and the outside world, transmitting much. In this collection Kondo and the house of Miyake demonstrated that they can deliver a powerful message even when reduced to an apparently impossibly reduced volume.
3 October 2020
How can human creation unify the diversity of humans? This was the underlying question beneath an Issey Miyake collection entitled Making Speaking, Speaking Making. The show was again directed by Daniel Ezralow, and the serried ranks of raised smartphones at the Lycée Carnot suggest the audience was hoping for a repeat of last season’s viral skyborne bouncing dress pay dirt. It did not quite happen, but even if not a monster hit, Ezralow’s expression of Satoshi Kondo’s collection was a pleasure to observe.It started with an emphasis on individuality. The backdrop was a white sheet featuring a black outline of a human in an outfit. A man emerged and apparently painted a new outline alongside it. Both outlines were then torn from the wall to reveal a group of models in white garments whose seams and sides were edged in black lines: Walking murder scene silhouettes, or clothes patterns rendered straight to the body, these were made using a computer program to print seamless garments, named A-POC.These lines mutated into a pattern in panels on garments suddenly colored, wide-lapelled, and made in a spongily scuba-ish material. The models came out in pairs wearing tractor-soled boots in which they moved around each other on the runway like potential dance partners. A loose black trench coat under a concave brimmed hat marked the end of this first section.A small pause preceded a series of loose silk pieces featuring subtly arresting color play achieved through a technique the notes identified as decalcomania—a pressure applied patterning—and cut to allow the wearer to raise her arms and have her jacket or coat billow behind in the breeze like a parachute.Then came a dress, skirt, and sweater called Kone Kone, which comprised rib-knit patches of red, gray, green, black, and yellow merged together, some loose checked pieces featuring quality printed contour lines, and a fringed and full knit dress shot through in its weave with countless different colors. Down full looks were comprised of modular, detachable parts: Pants featured slit, articulated knees. Paired with some serious base layers, these would make for interesting winter sportswear. Some full brownish pieces were cut in a blend of wool and paper and patterned with clay-inspired lines and markings.Finally, after an appetite-whetter of aurora borealis–inspired garments featuring a snow print and flurries of fuzzy fringing, we hit the finale.
This saw groups of models emerge wearing conjoined pieces of knitwear, sometimes as individuals and sometimes in groups as much as five strong. The colors began neutral, then turned Benetton bright, and each piece offered multiple arm, leg, and hand holes to allow its wearer(s) multiple choice dressing decisions. At the end all the models connected through these knits before meandering back and forth down the runway in a single Miyake-meshed mass of human and wool. This was an attractive collection whose presentation—from cutout characters to fully fleshed female community—was metaphorically meaningful too.
1 March 2020
When the three models in ochre underwear started circling the floor as DeLaurentis spoke-sang Hamlet’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing” line with crazy auto-tuned resonance, it felt briefly like some weird Yeezy aside in what had hitherto been a cheery show from Issey Miyake’s new internally appointed design director Satoshi Kondo. Then, whoa and hello! Three transparent hoop-stretched, horizontally color-striped dresses (plus hats) were lowered from their hiding place in the eaves above onto the arms-uplifted wearers. What sounded like a Fela Kuti jam (it was “African Nights” by Eric Muller and Maurin Zahnd), irresistible, started to play, and the models did what the music made you want to. As they bounced, so did the dresses, up and down against the wearer, thanks to signature Miyake springiness. It was great, the highlight moment in a show in which Kondo—please forgive the obvious gag—decluttered the careworn debris of the modern fashion experience by highlighting the potential of clothes that spark joy.Because who wouldn’t want to dance in a dress like that? It would make you go clubbing just to be able to wear it. It would make you want to run for the bus even if you were early. Similarly: the five opening looks in soft berry-tone jersey (with the occasional torn-brimmed hat in which a crew soared in jeté leaps), or the fringe-and-net pieces a little later in which the wearers shimmied and twisted and enjoyed the kinetic back-and-forth interaction of the garments and the semicircular fringed bags they clutched. Then there were the parachute pieces, face-covering long cagoules (fine festival wear), popper-split pants in vibrant colors, or full-hemmed dresses that billowed against the air as the wearers twirled. A section of models carved cool arcs around the polished concrete floor on electrically powered skateboards, smiling real smiles and relishing the pop and snap of their double-skirted dresses in the breeze they generated behind them, urethane-born clippers at full sail.Turning, bouncing, jumping, moving, being: This show convincingly showed clothes as a platform of experiential life enhancement, equipment in which to integrate with the world around you with pleasure. It also felt powerfully uncomplicated. Some of the garments were, well, basic, yet the fluidity of their fabrication made them appear fundamental.
As the diversely cast crew of models joined hands in a circle and orbited, or ran and danced their path down the runway in front of us at the end, they seemed exalting and uplifted: There was palpable joy in the room.
27 September 2019
Under the green girder glass roof of the Lycée Carnot, Issey Miyake’s models at first emerged in twos. Side by side, each pair approached the photographers before splitting to head to tangential corners of the room, continuing on a crisscrossed path of back-and-forth triangles whose significance became clear later. Once a few sets of looks were out from backstage, the two courts in front of us were a jumble of precisely moving young women who looked like they were practicing an extremely stately and very complicated football play.Singer-songwriter Hiroko Sebu played her Korg and sang to the accompaniment of a Miyake-panted fellow on a drum synthesizer. The first few looks were pairs wearing coats and skirts in “Dough Dough,” the house’s proprietorial sculpt-able fabric. Possibly the first pair and the second pair (albeit here in different colors) were presentations of the same garments sculpted in different shapes to show their adaptability. Then came a coat and a dress in a gray-on-gray sort of fifth-generationDoctor WhoTardis-interior pattern (I was a juniorWhovian) nubble knit. Later, there were a series of looks in Miyake’s signature springy accordion folds whose monochrome pattern resembled the keys on Sebu’s synth, but jumbled and distorted in size and perspective.Miyake’s famous and much-counterfeited triangle panel Bao Bao bag material was adapted and lightened into what looked like synthetic fabric, gently heat-pressed with a triangular grid (hence, perhaps, that interlinking equilateral runway routing). In navy, black, or white suits or various increasingly sunny multicolor and volumized looks—sometimes in slightly mundane shapes—these moved irresistibly against the eye. There were two long dresses in framed panels of multicolor technical pleating that bounced around like a Slinky on a steep stairwell as their models crisscrossed the courts, back and forth, back and forth.
1 March 2019
You know what you’re going to get at Issey Miyake—a romantic technicality invented by the original Issey Miyake decades ago that’s in tune with the now—and this season, it delivered, yet again, albeit without quite transmitting the soaring wearable stanzas of collections past.The collection was entitled Feeling the Wind, which those childish isolationists in the British section (hey, including me) couldn’t help tittering at. The loose tailoring in ripped-patterned tiger stripes over black, the dégradé texture knits, and the knit horizontally paneled trousers were all fine. A sports suit in navy patterned with irregular folds reminded me of my T-shirts when they come out of the suitcase every morning after three weeks on the road.The long wool jackets cut in fringe-edged strips that would indeed feel the wind were prettily frilled. The gust of paint-swirl color print in the second half of the show added an excitement that had previously only been hinted at in gentle flurries, suppressed by a surprising reliance on tailoring from a house that so often works beyond it. This collection didn’t blow you away. But it was fair enough sailing.
17 January 2019
As we increasingly experience so much in our lives by peering through tiny handheld digital windows, the inherently analog platform that is fashion has—this season, especially—responded by proposing garments that bear the physical trace of the hands that made them.This Issey Miyake collection took that urge for clothes that bear the authenticity of touch by ingeniously proposing garments that allow the wearer to shape and bend them to their own individual specifications. This was thanks to the introduction of a new fabrication the company is calling Dough Dough: The mostly finely, irregularly striped garments in a red, a teal-touched blue, and a purple, which you can see in hats, bodices, and skirts here, are made of the material. In very basic terms, the fabric looks stiff but is malleable. Woven into it is a urethane mesh that, as the name implies, allows it to be molded. One model demonstrated its versatility mid-runway by opening what appeared to be a flat piece of reddish material, unfolding it into a wide-brimmed hat, and then molding the brim this way and that as she walked in her long, richly color-stained dress. The rural-looking straw hats at the start, plus the burlap-looking hat similarly reshaped by a model earlyish in the show, seemed to indicate that Yoshiyuki Miyamae’s inspiration for the Dough Dough concept was rooted in a traditional concept. In the finale, models came out in groups according to whichever decorative stories their clothes were telling—these included non–Dough Dough looks of what appeared to be cotton printed with brushstrokes and a fabulous fabric that had seemingly been heavily oil painted and from which hung irregular scales of color. Those who were wearing the Dough Dough pieces had fun tweaking their necklines and scrunching their hemlines as they went. The idea of a garment you can easily shape to wear in a new way whenever you wish is pretty compelling—and just imagine were Miyake to team up with Anrealage to use the fellow-Japanese label’s fabrics that change color. A photochromic Dough Dough dress that you could change both in shape and color? You could Instagram that every day without ever getting bored.
28 September 2018
What ended up as a happy meditation on pattern and proportion at Issey Miyake (one fellow showgoer said afterward that he had an out-of-body experience during it) started out a little bit dressed-down health sanatorium. This clinical vibe came courtesy of designer Yusuke Takahashi’s opening triptych of a white shirt over a tee, a white shirt jacket, and a collarless white henley. Shortly afterward, Takahashi’s vibe loosened up.Beautifully rendered batiks were featured on matching blousons and shirts and one yellow-on-black full look of jacket and shorts. A collarless green jacket had a rich, deep appearance achieved by a process so complicated it took five lines of the press notes to explain yet left me none the wiser. The tie-dyes and ikat woven tracksuit blousons and pants were allyes, please. There was a nylon-looking pant (Look 8, I reckon, and 24) that had a beautiful, beautiful cut when seen laterally. A close-to-the-close section of pieces framed by competing backgammon isosceles triangles of burnt orange and black was gently beguiling. This was another solid Miyake collection that looked to combine traditional Japanese decorative techniques and innovative in-house technology to create ease-imbued garments convincingly of this moment.
21 June 2018
For the creative head of a brand devoted to innovation and technology, Issey Miyake designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae is particularly obsessed with nature. There’s a pleasing irony in that, and it enlivened his Resort collection’s standout pieces: a pleated dress and separates hand-painted by the studio in desert hues lifted from Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes. O’Keeffe is much-referenced these days—chalk that up to a recent Brooklyn Museum exhibition celebrating her iconic art and her inspiring lifestyle and fashion sense—but Miyamae’s interpretation stands apart from others. Miyake has as strong a signature as O’Keeffe did.The petal idea extended to solid pieces made using the house’s steam stretch technique, which creates pleats by using thread that shrinks when heated. The hems of tops, skirts, and dresses bloomed rather dramatically like tulips. Elsewhere, the focus was on relaxing the trademarks, including by serving up some denim separates. Issey “jeans” have absolutely nothing to do with the no-stretch, dark-rinse selvedge jeans that are trending in the market now. Miyamae chose the lightest-weight denim around, and rather than pleating it, he added surface interest by color-blocking it with black.
12 June 2018
Titled Silent Energy, Yoshiyuki Miyamae’s collection for Issey Miyake was a technologically advanced meditation on nature that sometimes resembled pagan folk dress from some alternative civilization. The set—in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo—was a few sparse stacks of glowing tubes meant to resemble campfires. Around them wandered some, at first, wintry, and later, much more colorful, future-primitives swathed in raiments that only Miyake’s technical capacity could have produced.A scrunchy demi-synthetic fabric that came textured in tightly ribbed, loosely undulating waves was the connective membrane that ran through many of the looks. At first, in snowy white and mixed with what looked like tufted variations of itself and (I’m guessing) faux fur ornament, it looked a littleDunexGame of Thrones. There was a nicely swathing down jacket over some furry pants and a furry turtleneck tabard over a skirt in the wave material.Then, just as seemed to be happening in the real world here this afternoon, spring sprang: Color slowly enveloped the collection. At first, it was tentative: some bark brown pants and strapped sneaker-boots under another white shift. Then, the wavy fabric was deployed in navy separates, bronze pants, and garments that contrasted the two. The silhouettes grew fuller. Odd, vaguely botanical headwear sprouted forth after a faux fur Muppet moment. Patchworked, increasingly layered garments resembled plowed, irregularly-shaped meadows seen from above. A cowled fuchsia and charcoal coat over some great looking tapered gray wool pants looked both ceremonial and coralline.
2 March 2018
Yusuke Takahashi didn’t waste bandwidth today with a theme, beyond a vague statement about “contemporary velocity” in modern urban life. The focus was on the often excellent clothes, a medley of thoughtfully pragmatic technical pieces interspersed with some innovatively fabricated soft tailoring and garnished by a few handsome, unusual knits.In a less experimental, but way more wearable, iteration of an idea explored by Anrealage last September, Takahashi insinuated a Miyake-developed heat-shrunk stretch tape into such garments as a synthetic blue jacket, scarlet track pants, and a billowing gray raincoat. The tape gently ruched the material around it, creating both decoration and shape, and looked cool.With a few exceptions, this was a barely ornamented collection. A reversible Harrington in black bouclé offered a more arresting inversion in red chambray; the wide-striped garment-dyed pieces were reversible, too, although what lay under the stripes was hard to glimpse. Shoes included sleek knitted sneakers in primary colors and black. There was plenty here to merit a temporary slowdown of that contemporary velocity in favor of a considered browse.
18 January 2018
Issey Miyake creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae has been looking at the natural world for inspiration of late. Pre-Fall is no exception. This season it was our sun itself that inspired him, but the results here were less literal and more graphic than at his recent runway collection—a positive development. There were no photo prints, for example, but there were orderly, curving rows of polka dots on a group of pieces made with the label’s proprietary baked stretch technique. Other looks made with transfer printing featured still more orbs backed by a fine grid pattern in the pleats’ gussets. Some of these pieces were actually cut in a circular shape.Miyamae’s approach is methodical; he’s as much a lab scientist as he is a designer. Take those arabesques of dots. Up until now, the company could only achieve straight pleats via baked stretch. Now they do curves. It’s a subtle difference to be sure, but subtlety has its rewards. A case in point was a very fine blazer made from a cotton thread woven in a Japanese Sashiko technique that was then steam pleated. With its frayed edges, it evoked tweed, but it remains remarkably light, making it ideal for travel. All of Miyamae’s stuff is genius for packing, including the season’s new top-handle leather bag, which deconstructs completely flat. Very clever.
9 January 2018
“Bored. Bored! Oh, my God. This is part of my life—wasted! That I will never get back! And for what?” The editor (a rather wonderful woman, not prone to hissy fits) who erupted thus was about halfway through the 20ish-minute wait outside Issey Miyake, during which we pigeonstepped through a narrow channel of steel barricades in the unseasonably beating sun, eventually making our way to four excellent but hopelessly outnumbered gentlemen who did the scanning and bag checking for a crowd of several hundred. This is worth a mention because houses should—in fact, must—start to consider the preshow experience almost as much as the show itself: For if you’re as galled as my queue companion before you see the first look, you’re hardly going to give a collection due diligence.Once inside—the show had started 18 minutes after the next one on my review schedule (Redemption) was due to begin, and yes, I missed it—we saw a backdrop of metallic fabric that bulged to a piano backdrop as people behind obviously pressed against it. What could this represent? The amorphousness of time? The anxiety of waiting for a Miyake show? My sense of growing smugness at predicting this easily avoidable situation? I’d earlier previewed the Redemption collection in anticipation of Miyake’s lateness.Ironically enough, it symbolized flexibility.Miyake’s aesthetic in womenswear might be a little banal—the menswear is far sharper—but even when infuriated, you cannot fault their dedication to innovation in fabrication. Three dancers came out and contorted, stretching their raiments of a dark fabric interjected with pale angled vents that yielded with the pressure and consequently became lighter in color with the stretching. Then a proper, tall model appeared in an asymmetrical poncho of the same fabric over tricksily pleated wide black pants. The show that ensued was notable for the diversity of age in its casting and a bouncing elastic cloak/dress worn barefoot by a serene-looking model—it was printed with a bird’s-eye view of what looked to be the North Pole. We were at the top of the world looking down, in technologically advanced fabrics that reflected the mountainscapes and rust- or kelp-like colorways of Iceland, where team Miyake had been on a research trip.It was fine. Waste less of our time in avoidable queues and you’ll get more of it in considered summation.
29 September 2017
Yusuke Takahashi recently went to the United Arab Emirates and lost himself in the desert. The result was a collection presented in an order meant to reflect the shifting of light across one sun-scorched day. (Which was pretty appropriate: Paris is so blazing that we were handed ice packs, the better to get through this hugely hot show.)We started in sludgy neutrals notable for the judo-jacket wrap shirts and superwide paper-bag pants, all in painstakingly perfected iterations of the house’s favorite synthetics and shrunken double-face cotton. A cracked mud pattern in knits and prints added eye feel to Takahashi’s carefully observed silhouettes.At sunset there was a single kapow! of color in a powerfully orange collarless shirt and pant ensemble, but it was the technical khaki suit that came immediately afterward that was the dreamiest site on this runway. Prints that looked like aerial photographs of the desert sliced then spliced together were in fact hand-rolled, geology-inspired, patterned marble printed onto polyester. As night fell we saw some gorgeous pieces in deep blue—how great is Look 46?—before the designer rose at the end of the runway to mark midnight, andfin.
23 June 2017
Lava, water, land.Issey Miyakecreative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae likes to draw on nature for inspiration; this season, he elected to focus on its primordial elements. That emphasis was fitting for a collection that went back to basics in another way, too: With this outing, the Issey Miyake brand launched a new strategy toward pre-collections, shifting toward durable wardrobe staples and building-block items in relatively simple shapes, the better to save up drama for the runway.This wasn’t a particularly newsworthy collection, in other words, but what it lacked in punch it made up for in detail. In particular, Miyamae made a variety of nice, subtle choices in how he and his team executed the signature Miyake pleating techniques, introducing hints of off-ness that drew these high tech clothes closer to the season’s nature theme. A flowing steam stretch pleat, for instance, was made extra watery by the fact that the digital stripe print on the fabric didn’t precisely align with the pleat, while the papery looks in a landscape print had been pleated once, vertically, by the usual process, and then a second time, horizontally, by hand. There was a pleasing sense of irregularity.The unfussy silhouettes, meanwhile, served as a cordial invitation to potential new Miyake fans who might be intimidated by the brand’s more avant-garde looks. That was especially true of the collection’s tidy polyester jersey knits and its blanketlike cashmere outerwear, but the principle extended to accessible pieces in a graphic radial pleat, done in a lightweight, dressy poly, and pleated pants, skirts, and dresses with a sarong-style attachment that could be styled according to the wearer’s preference. All in all, this season’s Miyake pieces made for a nice starter kit for newbies, or, for longtime fans, a range of items easy to mix and match with looks from collections past.
12 June 2017
Today, this house unlike any other relocated to a venue unlike any other: La salle des fêtes in Paris’s seat of political power, the Hôtel de Ville. Way above us in the balcony, you could see the silhouette of musician Ei Wada. He began to throw some shapes, deeply geekily, while he wah-wahed audio signals against each other just as the the first looks in a collection themed around the Northern Lights shimmered down the parquet runway.Miyake is lovable for many reasons—for most people, the clothes. Reviewers, however, love it for the press notes that divide each collection into suites defined with clinical rhetoric—they leave the adjectives to us—according to fabrication. So today, the first suite of looks 1 to 10) was called Auroral and fittingly incorporated Shetland wool dyed five colors and combed into five threads. The idea was that the yarn changed color according to the point of view of the observer. This was hard to see, however, and it was not until glimpsing an un-shiny purple woolen cloak and a similarly fabricated short-sleeved hoodie and pant that one began to see the lightness of being a Miyake-wearer.The second suite of looks—a two-parter running from 12 to 18 and 23 to 27—was called Plasma x Baked Stretch. It came after a sadly undescribed section of wide but finely divided sectional wool looks that were rather lovely (and unusual for Miyake in their chunkiness). The precise detail of how the glue-printed fabrics had been rendered into grids of purple on blue and burgundy on green that adopted a decorative structural integrity as logical but lustrous as that of the Palladian bling chamber around us was too much to take in along with the clothes themselves.The long closing section—Auroras x Steam Stretch—came with its own diagram to communicate how team Miyake had fashioned fabric that emanated in grids of concentric wavy lines from one central point, and which sprung up like a finely calibrated suspension system on the off beat of the wearer’s every step. This fabric was fantastic, yet sometimes the final silhouette into which it was fashioned was a little pantomime Peter Pan–meets–woodland fairy. Not that the many who love Miyake for its clothes more than its wondrous notes will much mind.
3 March 2017
A walk past the grand, frost-clad greenhouses—more green cathedrals—of Paris’s beautiful botanical gardens proved the perfect preamble for an Issey Miyake show focused on the sylvan. The print that lurked first at the neck of a crushed-wool collarless deconstructed suit with two functionless buttons and a zipper, then bloomed slowly forth on a shirt, then pants, then flocked trench was a hand-dyed birch design that was Jackson Pollock meets Peter Doig.The colors shifted toward mellow fruitfulness, rust and olive, and some garments were pitted with spidery, delicate crinkles that looked like a tonal outline of brittle fallen leaves. The shapes were strong—a gentle hybrid of formal and informal with enough originality to owe little apparent debt to either. Perhaps the most radical thing here was a loose-on-the-thigh, fitted-at-the-trouser slim knickerbocker. Two sets of checks added yet more pattern into a collection whose true marvel was the hosiery-snug yet unaggressive fit of its garments to the wearer’s body. Plus, the tree-color tricolor sneakers were cool too. At the end, a wide, loose nylon mac left unbuttoned floated past like a gust of bitter winter mist through the woodenly sitting watchers.
19 January 2017
For his latest Issey Miyake collection, designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae took a trip back to the future. The brand known for its relentless experimentation with the technology of garment creation determined, this season, to incorporate some technologies of a very ancient kind, namely, shibori and Itajime dyeing, traditional Japanese techniques. That backward glance was echoed, as well, in this collection’s emphasis on shapes that hearkened back to the simple Issey Miyake silhouettes of old—those durable, beautifully draped pieces that have recently come back into vogue.Of course, there were plenty of futuristic touches here, too. Alongside stunning minimalist items like the satin-finished wool overcoat with Arita ceramic buttons, there were also architecturally pleated garments created via the house’s signature 3D Steam Stretch technique, this time made using silk for a lighter weight, and eye-popping gradient stripe dresses done using the house’s Baked Stretch process. The vivid palette was a nod to the collection’s key reference, natural phenomena such as lightning bolts and rainbows, and that theme was echoed, as well, in this outing’s focus on materials with some iridescence or sheen. Even utilitarian items, like the clever adaptable jackets that buttoned off to become vests, or buttoned down to transform into parkas, got a little magic from their light-catching poly-blend fabric. It was a subtle touch, very much in keeping with the pared-back tone of the collection as a whole. This season, Issey Miyake seemed less about making daring statements than quiet, memorable ones.
4 January 2017
The blue-and-white gridded triangular accordion of a dress that came out as Look 23 was the heart of this free-spirited and fascinating Issey Miyake show. In the show notes, Miyake described its “Cut & Stick” fabrication, which involves “sticking together two different materials—a soft, fluid jersey fabric and a stiff fabric—[which] creates a rigid yet flexible texture.” That construction made the dress bounce up on the off beat of the model’s walk. It was like watching a spring coil down a flight of stairs.The collection started with a close examination of irregular trapezoid shapes on plain backgrounds, then panned back to create multiple patterns, then zoomed in again to the finale. Against a backdrop of four synthesized kazoo players and a synth accompanist playing what sounded like a segue on theSupermantheme song, it was all a bit much. You had to stretch your mind in tandem with the fabric to get the point. The grids at the heart of the collection reminded me of the spiritual geography of Australian aboriginal painting—the biological topography of repetition and dreaming as imaginarily seen from above. The invitation’s image of a pattern softly imposed on a plowed midsummer cornfield reinforced this. Some of the colors were brash—even trite—and the purposeful naïveté of the opening and closing sections was, although sophisticated and planned as a counterpoint, still what it was. But the heart at the middle of this show pumped and intrigued as assuredly as the Sony-developed electronic paper handbags that pulsed with changing color in the models’ hands.
30 September 2016
CouldIssey Miyake’s Yusuke Takahashi have known in advance that he would be staging his Spring show in a Paris university quadrant on a day when the temperature topped 90 degrees Fahrenheit? Well, yes, that’s the point of weather reports—and the reason Takahashi didn’t draft in a layer of polyurethane to protect us from theoretical showers. Instead, the sun burned, perspiration beaded and dripped, and globules of sweat suspended from hairs and trickled uncomfortably down scorched skin, as models paraded in his collection. They quivered in the heat like mirages, the air throbbing. The clothes were inspired by India. How appropriate.It was also a built-in advertising opportunity. Who in the audience didn’t wish they were wearing Takahashi’s opening looks: easy and breezy, wide-cut tunics and capacious trousers in subtly crumpled and rumpled monochrome fabrics—Japanese in design, Indian in inspiration, but with a decided Italian or Iberian undertone, like a Vittorio De Sica scene, or a still fromSuddenly, Last Summer?Neither were intentional. As ever, the obsession at Miyake was manipulation of fabric, techy treatments, intentional pleating and creasing. As the show progressed, color crept in: the patterns and hues of Holi—the festival of colors—were hand-printed across cotton, wool, and hemp modal, the pale suits blossoming into brilliant color. Shots of imperial blue or sulphur yellow had a visceral force. Prints varied: Some were abstract, misty watercolor notions; others were brilliantly multicolored marble prints, comprising five to ten printing blocks per design. After all that black and white, they popped. Yet it was the actual fabrics themselves—the touch, not the look—that made the biggest impact. Intentionally creased means non-iron; others resisted creases. A minimum of fuss—including buttons, zips, and most formal forms of fastening—both simplified and streamlined. It made the clothes look both antique and modern.Issey Miyake garments—those designed by Takahashi, and before—have always been tied in with those ideas of modern living, connecting the aesthetic with the animate. You can’t look good if you don’t feel good. And, as uncomfortable physically as this show was to watch, the fresh, summery, and hence immediate appeal of the clothes won through. Which is rare, given how summer and winter have blurred, at least on the runway. You wanted to strip off, and step into these garments. And maybe flay a layer of skin off too, to cool down.
But Takahashi can’t be held accountable for that.
23 June 2016
Yoshiyuki Miyamaemay be nuts about nuts. That was one takeaway from this season’s Issey Miyake outing, where Miyamae, the brand’s food-obsessed designer, turned his attention to the beauty of seeds, beans, and pulses. There was a figurative element to the reference: The big Issey Miyake retrospective recently on view at The National Art Center Tokyo got Miyamae thinking about the first principles of the label—the sprout from which it all sprung, as it were. That idea was then literalized via textures, shapes, colors, and prints that winked at roasted almonds, pistachios, coffee beans, and more.In a few instances, the theme read very clearly. It was unmistakable in coffee bean and pistachio prints, and legible in the variety of rounded silhouettes and textures, like that of a cocoonish cream-color coat paneled in strips of frayed linen that mimicked the hand of a ribbed almond shell. There was also something of the ovoid smoothness of a pale almond sliver in this collection’s best new trouser silhouette, a pair of harem-ish pants with a side-belted drape across the front.This being an Issey Miyake collection, much of the interest was in the textiles. Miyamae and his team continue to refine the algorithms underlying their Baked Stretch and 3-D Steam Stretch technologies, and this season they put them to use to create tonal print effects out of variegated texture, and to punch up the vibrancy of brilliant graphic prints by making them three-dimensional. Those graphic prints werenotinspired by nuts. Rather, these accessible looks drew on African textiles, giving tribal aesthetics a digital-age update. One of Miyamae’s cleverest executions was to bond the patterned fabric to a tan wool blend, and cut trench-inspired coats and jackets that revealed bright patterns here and there and—if you looked closely—showed the shadow of the same pattern underneath the tan. Most people, when they think Issey Miyake, instantly think pleats; Miyamae has lots of intriguing ideas where pleats are concerned, but he puts his creativity to work on other kinds of looks, too.
15 June 2016
How to describe the unique sound of a “Kankisenthizer,” a new musical instrument deployed at today’sIssey Miyakeshow? This reviewer’s best efforts included “Jean Michel Jarre conducts a kazoo orchestra,” and “a mournful cow on Auto-Tune,” but neither quite capture the seismic majesty of this contraption, made up of 10 exhaust fans rigged via photosensitive sensors to transmit sound via light.As for the clothes, in the hands of Yoshiyuki Miyamae, these iterations of Issey Miyake at first improvised very appealingly on the house standards of kaleidoscopic linear overload corralled by pleat. The so-called Baked Stretch opening section of glue-printed heated-fabric dresses and trousers in can’t-miss color combinations were fabulous to watch and looked delightful to wear. A dress of yellow and purple that accordioned up and down with the jaunty gait of its walker seemed to be just a little alive.Around halfway through, as musicians Ei Wada and Haruka Yoshida used the Kankisenthizer to tackle Pachelbel’s Canon, the palette became more muted and the clothes less compelling. A black section featuring abstract insulating outerwear followed a glimpse of reddish shirting over sweet jodphur-shorts: Neither were all that. Happily, the tempo (of the clothes) gathered pace again with a series of ingeniously fashioned spiral-pleated pieces whose natural puckered structures allowed for some interestingly modular shapes. Then came a mighty red cape, just before the finale, as the Kankisenthizer blessedly emitted its last rumbling gasp.
4 March 2016
Each season, there are apparently a dozen or soIssey Miyakecollections that we, the press, don’t get to see. They distill the often-obtuse influences of the main line into palatable edits. They do a lot of the pleats, for which they are frequently so well known, and which frequently fill most of their stores.It may be a cash cow, but the trouble with something as ubiquitous as Miyake’s pleasing pleats—and, to be frank, something so frequently and readily referenced by other designers—is that you get bored. As a designer and as an observer. So, how to experiment without alienating? How to offer something new without losing your identity? That’s the issue Issey Miyake’s menswear designer Yusuke Takahashi tackles every season.Generally, Takahashi eschews pleats—which is a wise decision. Instead, he founds the house’s menswear collections in fabric technology and a sense of ease—the ethos of pleats, without the folding. For Fall, he called the show Neonomad, a cluster of scrubland grass around the runway providing a nuance of the alien. It felt a little bit spaghetti Western, especially against the concrete architecture of the Palais de Tokyo, a French civic center with a Japanese-inspired name. How’s that for travel already?The clothes themselves were inspired by disparate cultures—that old fashion cliché of a gone roamin’ show mashing together Mongolian knits, horse riding, a few dresses and skirts for men, and sarouel-wrap trousers, visual shorthand for the exotic. The “neo” bit came through in the aforementioned garment tech, in Takahashi’s bubbly horsehair knits or fabrics described as wrinkle-free, form-stabilizing, functional, lightweight, washable, non-iron. All the things a peripatetic modern life may demand of clothing—the ills of contemporary travel, solved in one fell swoop.I’m not sure that’s best summarized by jarring jacquards of horseshoes (more Westerns) whose graphics resembled either Ettore Sottsass’s taste-traversing extremes or the cast wardrobe of ’80s teen sitcomSaved by the Bell, depending on sophistication of eye. I sat with the latter. Go-faster cycle shorts in brief knits were also an odd departure (for Fall, anyone?). But the photographer Kenji Hirasawa’s striking thermochromic imagery, printed boldly on Takahashi’s garments, gave them not only a psychotropic trippiness, but a sense of the living human beneath. Their physicality, sure, but also their needs, through cloth. Which was at the heart of this collection’s odd appeal.
21 January 2016
Stop playing with your food!Were you ever a child? Then at some point, most likely many times, you heard this from your parents. It is a time-honored mantra thatIssey Miyakecreative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae ignored with gusto this season. Miyamae had his mind on the cosmos this time out, but rather than get the point across by licensing images from NASA (expensive, surely), he created his various galactic prints by means of gelatin, whipped cream, and pancakes. That’s more of a fun fact than anything a customer would need to know to appreciate these clothes, but Miyamae’s methods do get to the heart of the Issey Miyake brand’s enduring appeal: It’s fusion of the space-age and the handmade.These Miyake looks were high-tech, to be sure. There was a fabulous variety of pleat techniques, everything from spiraling pleats created via heat-sensitive thread and the application of intense amounts of steam to a puckered check, reminiscent of quilting in its visual effect, that used the same thread and the same steam to actually tailor coats according to an algorithm woven into the underlying material. It’s easy to get swept up in the engineering of these garments, and lose sight of the fact that Miyamae and his team put their science in the service of creating more or less accessible looks, ones that sometimes flaunt a flair for the sculpturally dramatic. The drama was in full effect in this collection’s orb-shaped dresses and tops, but it was also evinced in vaguely kimono-ish looks in a deep red jacquard, its mottled, Mars-inspired pattern created not with food but by a traditional Japanese marbling technique calledsuminagashi. The sense of hand was palpable here; rough edges and little imperfections seemed to have been reckoned in as part of the algorithm. That’s what keeps the Miyake aesthetic—clinical though it may be—from feeling cold.
6 January 2016
Issey Miyake–style micro-pleats have been experiencing a runway renaissance of late. One place you won’t find a straightforward take on the house signature, though, is at Issey Miyake itself: At the brand’s show, designerYoshiyuki Miyamaecontinued to test the horizons of what a pleat can be and do, introducing a new “baked stretch” technique that molds pleats into the body of a fabric. The most compelling looks in the collection were the ones that featured wavy baked stretch pleats, with contrasting colors printed into the curves; as the sculptural garments moved, they had a spring action, a little like that of a Slinky. The motion was surprising but subtle—you could easily imagine wearing these pieces.The looks with the most instantaneous appeal, however, were the bright, color-blocked ones punctuated with touches of fringe. Miyamae and his team had a tropical theme going here, witnessed in the collection’s palette, but the raffia textures of the fringed pieces nicely underlined the hothouse atmosphere. There were also net tops with a similarly earthy charm—an unusual tone for Miyake, a house that hews to a synthetic aesthetic as a rule, but a welcome addition to the brand vocabulary. Pleats remain the star at Issey Miyake, but there are new supporting players.
2 October 2015
You could go mad trying to stay abreast of the volume of photo books streaming out of Japan. Photographers there regard putting out a book the same way their counterparts in the West think of staging a gallery show. It makes so much sense, not just for production but also for access to an audience. When Yoshinori Mizutani won awards forTokyo Parrots,he caught the eye of Yusuke Takahashi, the menswear designer for Issey Miyake. He recognized a kindred spirit in Mizutani, both of them leading lights in Japan's new generation of creators, and both keen to prove that a photo's potential extends beyond a flat printed image.Takahashi's theme was urban nature, reflecting the ways in which the natural world interacts with a man-made environment. Tokyo, for example, has a large population of parrots, captured in Mizutani's stunning hyper-real photographs, which were printed here on shirts, woven into jacquards for a coat and a pair of pants, and dissected into strips of fabric that were woven into tweeds that still maintained the vivid color schemes of the original images. Utterly charming, if you fancy psittacines cavorting across your torso come next spring.Mizutani's latest book,Colors,was similarly sourced, its abstract urban imagery creating fractured patterns for shorts suits that possibly had a little too much of the harlequin about them. Takahashi also referenced Luis Barragán's buildings in Mexico City for a passage of outfits that looked pretty much just like that: artificially constructed architecture for the body. Again, surprisingly theatrical for Miyake, and slightly disappointing for that. Still, Takahashi had us at the parrots.
25 June 2015
For Resort, Issey Miyake creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae and his team visited the tropics, collecting leaves, screw pines, and ferns along the way. (Where, exactly, is undisclosed: They'd prefer not to pin the season's inspiration to any particular place in the world.) From there, they developed a collection lush with deep, dark colors, then injected it with brighter moments.Outerwear led the conversation. For the dramatic, a photoreal, green-on-red print of the tropical plant Alocasia was woven in a six-yarn jacquard technique, then fashioned into a trench that was cinched together at the waist with pleating. The loose silhouette of a reversible double-faced wool coat in chartreuse and cornflower blue lent it some subtlety.The leaf idea moved beyond prints, with flappy trousers that could be worn three different ways: wrapped in the front or back, or just left hanging. The team also experimented with its3-D stretch technique, using the "nut" pleat—which resembles a star anise—as a basis for the collection's more classic pieces, like a cropped high-neck jacket.Perhaps the presumed humidity of the tropics was also on the mind, because this season marked the first time that some of the pleated garments were woven with natural fibers. A unique proposition for a label so set on developing everything new, but one that will please a customer who prefers the feel of cotton against her skin.
24 June 2015
The sheer joy that usually infects an Issey Miyake collection was tempered in the January men's show. The clothes were elegant, true, but they were darker, more subdued than usual. The women's outing today was called Colorscope, and that title was enough to suggest a full-on Miyakefest of vibrancy. But the restraint exercised by creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae harked right back to January. The opening section of primary-toned separates—yellow, green, blue, purple, red—concentrated those hues inside a textured black fabric, almost like a honeycomb, so the color itself was shadowed into suggestion. The effect was beautiful, like the drape and wrap of the clothes themselves, but it was melancholic.That same low-key mood attached itself to a group of classic pleated Miyake pieces, springy from theSteam Stretchtechnique, but shaded in tones of earth and forest. Again, beautiful, but slightly mournful. A final group featured outfits in 3-D star patterns inspired by snow crystals. It sealed this collection as one in which remarkable technique had been turned inward, to somewhere pensive and questioning.But with the finale, it was almost as though Miyamae-san wanted to reverse everything that had come before. The models emerged in darkness with an obi-like situation at their waists. When they untied it, a full scarf-hemmed skirt was released. Then they whirled like dervishes. Sheer magic.
6 March 2015
"Very elegant." Yusuke Takahashi said that more than once when he was talking about his intentions for his latest collection of menswear for Issey Miyake. It's true, there was definitely something sharper, more structured, morearchitecturalabout the clothes this season. The windowpane suits and stand-collar jackets were as sharp as a tack. The rich purples and blacks (some with the dark sparkle of rain on asphalt) upped the sophisticated urban feel. That was a distinct departure from the usual artisanal bent of his collections. Takahashi amplified it with his use of silk from one of Japan's oldest silk factories, which lent a sleek sheen to the pieces. A photo print from Satoshi Fujiwara added a new pop of gloss.One inspiration was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect whose visionary work in the early 20th century was influenced by Japanese design. Takahashi repaid the debt by reworking Mackintosh's signature Art Nouveau grids and ovals in an impressive jacquard. He referenced Mackintosh's dandyism in the silky scarves, the plus fours, the Scottish plaids abstracted in huge blanket wraps, and the dévoré velvets in the rose motif that was a favorite of the architect's. Takahashi's rigor and Mackintosh's richness made a provocative Tokyo-meets-Glasgow match.
22 January 2015
More than a bit of science goes into the creation of an Issey Miyake collection: Many of the fabrics developed in-house have transformative properties engineered in a legitimate laboratory. At the same time, designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae takes a lot of his inspiration from the organic. For Pre-Fall, it was the hexagon, nature's perfect shape. Dressy cropped jackets and car coats done in a 3-D honeycomb pattern were made out of the label's magical "steam stretch" fabric, a heat-reactive material that was steamed into different shapes. The pieces lay away from the body and had a bouncy, lively feeling to them. Diagonal stripes were prominent too, zigging all over a trench made of Ecsaine, Miyake's leather alternative. Blues and berries were accented by golden tones drawn from different shades of honey. While each piece typically housed a trick or two—like a bag that's entirely reversible, or a jacket that can be flipped upside down and worn as a bolero—some of the most impressive details were the simplest. For instance, hardware obsessives will be taken with the beautiful Arita porcelain buttons on a classic wool coat.
21 January 2015
For decades now, the staging of an Issey Miyake show has elicited an emotional response based on the thing that is happening while the clothes are presented. That thing has ranged from the grandeur of orchestras and ballet companies to the humble pleasure of…balloons? Yes, it was helium-filled balloons that danced throughout today's show, cued by the manipulation of musician Ei Wada, who was phantoming on an organ the whole time that balloons rose and fell behind him. If the method of his manipulation was scarcely comprehensible, it made a perfect fit with the nature of the clothes themselves. New concept: 3-D steam stretch. Creases programmed into fabric were brought to life by the application of steam. Super-textured, but not knitted, not pleated, and as light as air. There was a color palette to match: pale yellows, lilac, turquoise, biscuit. Suggestions, not statements.Designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae has a real knack for taking fabric-tech breakthroughs and turning them into fresh, springy outfits like the ones we saw here. But he also made stoles that he wrapped around more conventional pieces, to give them another dimension. Paired with big, almost Edwardian hats, they were a quirky reminder of the way European dress insinuated itself into Japan from the late 19th century onward. Incongruous, perhaps, but also a measure of the depth of thought that shapes this collection.
26 September 2014
Tropical Dandies, the theme of Yusuke Takahashi's latest collection for Issey Miyake, didn't immediately present itself as a particularly Japanese notion. Takahashi-san himself is quite taken with Palau, in the Pacific, so he, at least presumably, knows about the "exotic resorts" he claimed inspiration from. And his set was the kind of whitewashed boardwalk you see stretching out into azure seas in tourist brochures. But his collection's connection with the tropics was initially more conceptual than anything else. True, the jungle provided fibers—wild banana and pineapple—for fabrics, but those fabrics were cut into tweedy jackets. Attractive and light enough for summer in the city they may well have been, but they were far from any notion of tropical. Likewise the "tropical" prints that were dramatic graphics handmade by Kyoto artisans, rather than the more familiar flora and fauna devoured by fashion's current appetite for print.But once you got past the semantics, the collection exploded, answering the call of what the show notes described as "rampant jungle and white sandy beach." A linen djellaba over a navy shawl-collar blazer and white shorts made for a cool holiday look. The signature Miyake pleating was dyed with four different blues to create a cobalt intensity that radiated. More men should know how flattering that pleating is.It's a fact that something magical happens when Miyake menswear gets anywhere near the color blue, and, as this collection proved, when mysterious undersea creatures are brought into the mix, it just gets better. That is, of course, an entirely personal reaction, but Issey Miyake has always had that effect on his fans, and he has been blessed with protégés who have perpetuated his legacy to similar effect. Takahashi is one such, but he proved with today's collection that he is capable of insinuating his own idiosyncrasies. In the end, it was simply a case of different strokes for different dandies.
25 June 2014
Issey Miyake, when you get right down to it, is an R&D firm—just one that happens to engineer clothes, not beauty products, cars, or mobile phones. Designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae, who has been with the company since 2001 and at the helm of the women's collection since 2011, is determined to continue on with his founder's tradition of innovation. Miyamae's technique, called steam-stretching, uses steam to shrink fabric into a desired shape (usually pleats). Miyake garments are always pleated after they've been formed, which is the opposite of how most designers do it. In the case of steam-stretching, each item is made out of the house's A-Poc material. A-Poc is unique because it is fused together in a machine instead of sewn together. The resulting pieces look like paper dolls: One must only cut on the perforated lines for them to be ready to wear.While technique is essential to Miyamae's process, beauty is equally dear. This season, the designer surveyed the horizon for ideas. A cloud print that covered an A-line trench and a pair of jeans was culled from three hundred photos his Tokyo team took while on a hike. A spectrum of blues was represented: There was a swing coat in slate-colored perforated suede, a steam-stretched azure blazer, and navy trousers with one extra-large inverted pleat up the front of each leg. A sunset-horizon print was used on a double-pleated dress; when you opened it up like an accordion, the sunset turned into white, pillowy clouds. Shots of yellow on an oversize work shirt and a double-shawl-collar jacket were meant to be like rays of sunlight.While the techniques were easy to marvel at, it was the clever formation of the pieces that made them worthwhile. A black-and-white dress with curved shoulders played an optical illusion, while many jackets were pleated only on the shoulders and at the sides of the torso to sculpt an hourglass shape. Who said R&D types are geeks? These clothes were gorgeous.
24 June 2014
At the end of the Issey Miyake show today, there was a rare fashion moment as the audience stomped and cheered for designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae to take one more bow. It's been a while since Issey featured as a must-see on the crowded fashion calendar, but anyone who goes to these shows regularly knows they'll witness a special fusion of creativity, craftsmanship, intelligence, and plain old jaw drop. Well, maybe the special effects aren't always jaw-dropping, but they usually elicit a heartily spontaneous reaction, as happened today when a handful of models walked onto the catwalk with flat semicircular portfolios that they rapidly unfolded and converted into springy, concertina-pleated items of clothing. The helpful explanatory notes on each guest's seat described a process of "hand-pleating on the curve."Today's theme, "rhythmatic forest," was Miyamae's excuse for a collection that focused on organic shapes and patterns to mesmerizing effect. Graphically abstracted leaf prints created an almost Art Deco sense of movement, which was in tune with developments elsewhere in fashion this season. In fact, the graphics and silhouettes were generally more…what's the best word for this?…familiarthan they sometimes are: Tailored jackets and coats, slim pants tucked into boots, and oversize blanket wraps provided a context for the marriage of artisan and machine that creates purest Miyake. The technique du jour was steam-stretching, in which computers program steam heat to shrink jacquard fabrics into three-dimensional grooves. That mechanical process yielded gorgeously organic fabrics, patterned like tree rings, which Miyamae cut into poetic shapes that shivered sensuously as the models walked. The coup de grâce was a deep, rich color palette. Or maybe the coup de grâce was the live soundtrack from guitarist Ei Wada and vocalist Chiyako, whose musical accompaniment was as empathetic as the impression made by the clothes themselves.A line from the show notes, presumably endorsed by Issey himself, best defined the overall uplift of the show: "Cloth harbours the power of life: wrap yourself in it and feel an instantaneous metamorphosis into pure joy at the wonder of living." Translation: For God's sake, if it feels good,do it.
27 February 2014
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
21 January 2014
Yusuke Takahashi took on the fundamental contest of human existence—man versus nature—with his new collection for Issey Miyake Men. On the one hand, he wanted to change the line's "relaxed style to something more contemporary," so he took a look at the cut and cloth of British tradition. On the other, Takahashi traveled to Iceland, where the elemental dynamism of nature—fire and ice, volcanoes and glaciers—impressed him. The clothing he subsequently designed blended order and chaos to great effect.Predictably, it was order with which the presentation began: more tailoring than we're used to seeing in a Miyake show. "An elegant and masculine style," said Takahashi. But the clothes were patterned with cosmic traceries and the lines of geological strata. As the show unraveled, order devolved into huge, rough-cut ponchos, again striated with layers of mineral color. Some pieces shone with the glow of the Northern Lights, others flared with magma. A Miyake innovation called prism tape trailed down jackets like a luminous pinstripe or was woven into shiny Arctic explorer looks. Toward the end of the lineup, color really began to sing, in kaleidoscopic layers of Miyake's signature pleating. The freewheeling vibrancy made one wonder whether Takahashi had moved from one fine British tradition to another. "No, no, it's not rave, he insisted. "It's a rainbow."
15 January 2014
On some deep conceptual level, an Issey Miyake collection remains utterly impenetrable. Whatever the current level of engagement from Issey himself, his acolytes have perpetuated his hybrid of philosophy and fashion to great effect. We read the rationale, then we watch the clothes go by. At which point it barely even matters how the whiz-bang fabric technology produced this or that effect, because the clothes themselves speak utterly winning volumes.Today, for instance, the theme was light—starlight, moonlight, sunlight—so the show opened with perforated leathers, like stars poking through heaven. It was an effect so delicate that it scarcely interfered with the strong silhouettes. Stronger, in fact, than the usual Miyake sinuousness. But there was an overall sporty, street-y substance to the collection. The shoes had an eerie here-I-am flicker that would alert drivers at night. And the daylight section featured unmissably intense gradations of color, from dawn to dusk. Is there any other label that would be attuned to such subtleties?Ei Wada, who has contributed to Issey soundtracks in the past, today provided the music as Braun Tube Jazz Band. He essentially turned an army of monitors into theremins, sensitive to his touch. It was so mind-boggling, visually and aurally, that one was happy to take refuge in the (relatively) uncomplicated nature of the clothing.
26 September 2013
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
28 June 2013
The Issey Miyake presentation began with a little piece of theater. In unison, three models threw wide the transom windows above the show space. "Open the window and look at the world," exhorted the notes on everyone's chair. The beauty we miss in everyday life was the theme. That translated into another exercise for the Miyake studios in exalting humble, traditional techniques in the service of high fashion.There is something so utterly engaging about this house's reason for being that critical faculties wilt in its face. Whenever you bought a ticket for the Issey ride (and for some people, that can mean 40 years ago), you're on it forever. One reason is that the flame has burned relatively steadily since Miyake himself surrendered complete control. This season, for instance, Yusuke Takahashi took over design of the men's range from Yoshiyuki Miyamae, but the celebration of the sheer joy of life rolled seamlessly on. The only detectable difference was that Miyamae was possibly a little more urban in his approach. Under Takahashi, the emphasis was firmly on the effects to be obtained from traditional methods of dyeing. And they were, as ever, impressive.Miyake is one fashion house where show notes are genuinely useful, because they explain exactly what it is you're looking at. Itajime, for instance, is a technique where blue and red are silk-screened on top of fabric that has been dyed black. The winning result in this show was a soft cotton suit color-blocked in a blurry windowpane check. The traditional twisting method of tie-dye used bleach here, to take color out rather than put it on. Miyake's take on batik produced a more complex result than the usual, with intense blues, pinks, and whites creating striated effects. When some or all of these techniques came together in one look—a coat, a shirt, shorts—it was hard not to feel a jolt of life affirmation.And this was all in addition to the house's signature pleating effects and prismatic prints. Were they florals? If so, they were the most uplifting take on one of the season's biggest trends.
26 June 2013
"True Smiles" was the counsel on the backstage notice board, with a scattering of smiley faces to reinforce the message. Issey Miyake is the happiest house in fashion, at least as it presents itself on the catwalk; a spirit of unbridled optimism is continually refracted through collections that charm and intrigue. The impish Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the label's latest standard-bearer, seems so ideally suited to his post, it's as though he were made in a lab just for the job. Would that all trains of fashion succession ran so smoothly.Today, Yoshiyuki-san was wearing a spectacular pair of jeans printed with an aerial map of Paris (they also come in London and Tokyo variants). They weren't shown on the runway, but they were part of a collection that was inspired by landscapes seen from the sky, or viewed rushing by through train windows. More specifically, it seemed to be the British countryside that shaped what we saw. Maybe that was just because the soundtrack, provided by the live-mixing genius of the Open Reel Ensemble (Google them!), started with "Scotland the Brave" and proceeded in a Celtic swirl. But the first outfits definitely featured glen plaid. The color-blocking that came later was equally evocative of the multicolored fields of the U.K.'s cultivated agricultural terrain. Collages of diagonal stripes looked like a deconstructed tartan.But you hardly needed to be a topographer—or a Celtic specialist—to appreciate a collection that was more straightforward than usual. The signposted fabric innovation this time was "hollow fiber"—like macaroni, apparently, but woven into a cloth that was both warm and light for shapely jackets. They were paired with the voluminous skirtlike pants that were a key item. Those came slashed open to reveal checks or stripes, or matched to body-conscious roll-necks for a look that combined past and future in a winning illustration of the blend of tradition and technology that helps Issey Miyake stand alone.
28 February 2013
One uncredited member of fashion's design team this season has been Mother Nature. The proliferation of creative outerwear suggests a reaction to worsening winters, even if that hasn't actually been the reality, until this weekend at least, when Paris is suffering its worst blizzard conditions for at least 20 years. It would be in such an environment that Issey Miyake's latest collection made most sense. One of its key components was the metallic film used in emergency blankets. It wrapped the final section of the show, from coat lining to panels on parkas and pants to full head-to-toe, turning the model into a one-man solar panel. Repurposing technology for a fashion consumer has been part of Issey's MO throughout his long, brilliant career, and, with the direction of the show credited to "Issey Miyake and The Reality Lab," it was easy to see the master's hand at work here.At the exact opposite end of the sartorial spectrum, there were coats, blousons, and jackets woven from fabrics from old collections with a traditional technique calledsakiori.Sashiko(stitch work) was used for argyle patterning. The show notes are always scrupulously careful in this house to make clear exactly which fabrics and techniques are being employed. Something those notes referred to as "the traditional picnic blanket" inspired quilted, square-cut, zipped jackets that had an odd samurai flair. They also "fold flat and roll up for easy carrying."The emphasis on utility was admirable, even if it ultimately meant that the collection didn't sing the way a Miyake collection can. Still, the ever pragmatic Issey would undoubtedly consider that a small price to pay for clothes that guarantee, in the words of the designer's scribe, "a freer lifestyle during the winter months." And, as the snow continues to fall, thousands of Parisians would surely agree.
16 January 2013
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
7 January 2013
Every season has its storm in a teacup, its clutch of personalities who absorb the fashion community in thought, word, and deed. But beyond that, there are the tribes who tirelessly toil—often thanklessly, in terms of media coverage—to create the collections that give substance to the fashion calendar. That train of thought rode down the tracks in one's mind today during a particularly impressive showing from Issey Miyake. Yoshiyuki Miyamae—the designer who is now attached enough to the line that it is he who takes the bow at show's end—is visibly youthful (trusting, that is, to the evidence of one's own eyes), and it was youth, beauty, and a gloriously summery freshness that today's collection communicated.First, there was color in delicious combinations, in jersey dresses with a simple, drapey ease. Although there is, of course, no such thing as simple in the world of Miyake, so whatever fabric effect you were looking at was inevitably head-spinningly obtuse. Here, something called "double-sided transfer printing" meant that fabric was colored front and back, each side visible through the other. "Yarn melting"? Well, that sounds interesting, and judging by what was on the catwalk, it looks good too, if it was responsible for the dresses with the boing-boing bounce. "Steam stretch"? Probably the same, if it meant the black and white knits pulled out into pixie corners and set with heat.One characteristic of the Miyake collection has always been an elegance of line. It was at its best here because it was called upon to corral all the colors and patterns into one coherent whole. If the world looked this way, it would truly be a better place.
27 September 2012
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
28 June 2012
A novel riposte to the stifling heat wave that has gripped Paris was offered during the Issey Miyake show today. "Cooling bags" from Japan were passed out. When you punched them hard, a sachet of water was released into ammonium compounds, which instantly become ice-cold. And so a complex chemical process produced a gratifying physical result. You couldn't have wished for a more perfect metaphor for the clothes that followed.The small print on the show notes indicated that the collection was "directed by Issey Miyake and the Reality Lab," an acknowledgment that implied Issey was back in the driving seat after 18 years away from menswear. He's always been in the background somewhere, so maybe the mention wasn't quite the scoop it seemed. Still, it was easier than usual to see his thumbprint on a collection and show which, from the invitation onwards, were an homage towashi,a Japanese paper that has been used for centuries to make clothes. It's clearly a humble fabric, which fits with the humility of Issey's own ethos over the years, but equally it was elevated by the technological skill of the Miyake studios into something scarcely recognizable as paper. In sporty outerwear or sharp tailoring, treated to be water-repellent, twisted to make yarn that was woven into canvas, or knitted into ikat-dyed pieces,washiproved itself startlingly versatile.You felt like you were seeing a creative solution to a problem you hadn't quite nailed down yet (something to do with the husbanding of natural resources, perhaps, but only time can clarify that). Still, there was also the quiet charm, craft, and common sense that this house delivers season after season. A final group of sculptural pieces made no pretense other than to celebrate the plain style and substance ofwashi .In their own way, they were homespun art. Of course, Issey himself would have had no time for such a notion.
27 June 2012
The presentation of Yoshiyuki Miyamae's second women's collection for Issey Miyake was a reminder of the subtle but impressive ingenuity of Japanese showmanship. The show opened with a practical demonstration of "steam stretch," a new fabric technology that uses applications of steam to shape clothes woven from a combination of silk and stretch yarn. Within seconds, anonymous squares of fabric were completely transformed into sinuous dresses. It was a spectacular effect, subsequently compounded by a show that featured more of the same. There was never a dull moment, because there'd be another innovative something or other along within seconds.Alongside "steam stretch," there was a subtext called "mineral miracle" that used the angular refractions of minerals as the inspiration for geometric prints. A trompe l'oeil waffle knit added deceptive texture. The mesh laid over quilted pieces was another way to introduce unexpected movement to clothes.Underpinning the show was a live soundtrack by a duo called Open Reel Ensemble. Working reel-to-reel, they taped and mixed live sounds (the steam of an iron, for instance) into an electronic score. "A physical intervention in music and time," was the way they described what they did, but their combination of old- and new-tech and timeless emotion seemed like an absolutely perfect analogy for the spirit of Japan's new fashion wave.Chapeau, as the French say.
3 March 2012
Ego has submerged at Issey Miyake. Four designers from the Miyake studio took a bow at the end of this show, and it was hard to escape the conclusion that design by consensus had acted as a great creative leveler, leaving a collection that, while recognizably Miyake, was also a much more muted and less engaging version of the aesthetic than those offered by Dai Fujiwara and Naoki Takizawa, who followed Issey himself. The staging was Shaker-plain, too.The collection's governing idea was "kasane," meaning "to layer," which seemed to translate into functional items given a bit of a kick with artful techniques, with function rather than art dominating. Still, the Miyake studio has a way with artful technique, both traditional, as in the arimatsu shibori method of dip-dyeing (used on checked flannels), and timely, as in the needle-punching that united two layers of checked wool gauze in a crazy paving effect on suits. Miyake's signature pleating gave a little lift to colorful jersey tops and cotton trousers, and there were a couple of outfits in Ecopet polyester recycled from plastic bottles that, amid all the functionality, struck an incongruous Gareth Pugh note. Given the thoughtfulness of this house, there's a distinct possibility that the low-key nature of not only the presentation but also the clothes was a statement about the inappropriateness of showing off at such a difficult time (especially in post-tsunami Japan). If that's the case, the studio aced it.
18 January 2012
This was the first collection for Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the designer who has taken creative control at Issey Miyake after ten years working in the design studio, but the through line with his predecessors was utterly seamless, all the way back to Issey himself. That's some testament to the durable ethos of this label, where Japan's artisan traditions and futuristic technology meet to make clothes like no others. Here, for instance, there was the body-mapping of extraordinary tribal-patterned leggings that looked like paint but were actually achieved by a process that… well, suffice it to say, it worked.For all that, the latest Issey collection didn't quite attain the heights of those earlier efforts. That might have had something to do with the theme: Bloom Skin detailed the life of a flower—bud, stem, petal, blossom, bloom—as a metaphor for a woman. The complexity of the concept was underlined by show notes that itemized details such as "the fagoting on seams, representing the veins on a leaf." The slits on clothes suggested a bud bursting. So did the jabots. The energy involved in the process of blooming was conveyed by aerodynamic body-consciousness—racerbacks, bike shorts—and an electric color scheme of hot pink and citron. And the visual accompaniment by Tokyo's genius WOW Inc. was a perfectly complementaryTron-like ballet of zap and zing.So why didn't the show lift spirits with its energy? Maybe it was just too techno. The loveliest piece in the presentation was a plain navy shift with a draped back. It came somewhere toward the end, when the flower was in bloom. It might have been its plain old humanism that charmed. And that definitely felt well within the Issey spirit.
1 October 2011
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
22 June 2011
An Issey Miyake show is an education, but in the gentlest way. The pitch is usually intimidatingly academic; the execution is always enthrallingly intimate. Today, the foundation of the collection was taping, so basic to the manufacture of clothes, but here transformed on the runway before our eyes into an exercise in pure form. In a matter of seconds, black-clad assistants folded and stapled paper tape, origamilike, into five items of clothing: a tailcoat, a dress, a skirt, a peplum jacket, a collar. Models wearing these paper garments were followed by other girls wearing fabric versions of the same look. It was an inventive insight into the process of design. But that is typical of Miyake designer Dai Fujiwara. This was his last collection after five years as creative director. In a week where good-byes have been very much on fashion's mind, his was one that you wished more people had taken the opportunity to experience.After the prototype experiment, Fujiwara offered variants on the taped shapes and the houndstooth and herringbone patterns that the folding created. A pixelated houndstooth on a jacket was abstracted on the skirt beneath. Huge padded Vs made an angular puffer vest. Fujiwara drew on the work of artist M.C. Escher to create optical-illusion jacquards. One drop-waisted dress wove ribbons into chevrons and let the ribbons float untrimmed. It was a lyrical effect. But no more so than a dress that layered diaphanous fabric so light its colors seemed to be shifting before your eyes. It might be the most beautiful piece of the week. And if the planets align in some more sensible way, Dai should eventually be able to look back on his five years at Miyake as a pioneering moment in fashion, where thought and deed were united in an inspiringly humanist package.
3 March 2011
At the end of Pen, theIssey Miyakeshow for Fall 2011, the models were all handed felt-tips. They turned to the blank wall at the back of the stage and scrawled idiosyncratic graffiti. Miyake designer Dai Fujiwara drew a big fat fountain pen, alongside which he wrote "Get a Pen, Gets friends." That jumbly high-touch-low-tech exhortation was even more meaningful given its source. In keeping with his mentor Issey, Dai is one of fashion's most forward-looking designers, even bringing in revolutionary mathematician William Thurston as the collaborator on one collection. But with his latest men's show, Dai dialed down the futurism in favor of the antique wonders of the written word. His cast of young literary types could have been wannabe novelists in mid-century Paris. The retro cast of their clothes certainly supported that notion, and it made for an appealing take on the 1940's trend that's nibbling at the edges of menswear for the new season.Shabby suits, oversize thrift shop coats, big schlumpy knit jackets…a fifth of Scotch and a half-smoked Gitane would have completed the picture. But this ambitious young writer would also have needed something smarter in which to meet a prospective publisher, and maybe even a save-for-best evening ensemble. Dai sensitively offered both. And then—who could possibly want to pursue a theme like that for an entire collection?—he mercifully veered off into Isseyworld and its provocative collages of pattern, shape, and texture. They make this collection a perennial delight, with its acute combination of Western convention and Eastern experiment. An inkblot-printed shirt enlarged on the literary theme, but it also had an un-literary graphism. Equally eye-catching—a chevron-printed puffa, worn over an olive green suit.
19 January 2011
The weight of research behind every Issey Miyake collection, captured in the seasonal manifesto that is distributed at each show, could hobble one's enjoyment of the clothes themselves, were it not for the fact that creative director Dai Fujiwara manages to produce things that float effortlessly into one's brainpan and linger there. It was especially easy with today's show, which took ghosts as its starting point. Japan has a great track record for unhinging the Western world with spooky visions (start withRingand proceed inexorably towardAudition), but Fujiwara chose to launch his show with a voice-over from cuddly Alfred Hitchcock, after which his ghosts were relatively genteel visions. The house's fabric technology was apparent in a strapless dress with origami reliefs, or a full-length piece in an open-weave lattice. Then a more spectral feel kicked in with sheer items: a purple Aertex coat, a translucent shawl over a dress in a pale yellow techno lace, a transparent striped poncho. Miyake's signature micro pleats gave a graphic smock and the finale jacket an undulating life of their own, as though they were breathing. It was subtly effective, maybe too much so, because after a string of knockout shows, you had the feeling that Fujiwara was taking a breather.
30 September 2010
Everyone in the audience at the Issey Miyake show today could lay claim to a personal first. There can't have been a soul in the place who had ever been to a fashion show before that was inspired by a fish.Designer Dai Fujiwara has a fierce intelligence; he takes inspiration where he finds it. For Spring, he'd considered the trout and decided its elegance and its deceptiveness made it an appropriate starting point for an exercise in fashion illusion. While the result was too scattered to be considered one of his best, it still left the viewer with some striking images—and some winning outfits.The abstract broken plaids that opened the show suggested sun glinting through water on fish scales, and the trout's rainbow speckles inspired a woven dot pattern for a suit and coat. Fujiwara is a playful wonder with colors: The artisanal blues and vermilion stood out here. He's also capable of creating sober tailored pieces, or at least sober on the surface: Hidden pockets were supposed to be a sartorial correlative to the deviousness of the trout. (With Miyake's last women's show, Fujiwara proved himself a master mathematician—now he's adding piscatorial psychologist to his repertoire.) And, because you can't have a trout without a fisherman, the designer also offered some sporty, summery pieces that would suit a day hanging out at the creek.
23 June 2010
There's always been as much science as there is art in an Issey Miyake collection. Dai Fujiwara consolidated the connection with Fall's offering, inspired by the revolutionary mathematician William Thurston's geometric models for the shape of the universe. As abstract as that sounds, the result was an often breathtaking evolution of last season's rainbow-nation tribalism. After the show, Fujiwara and Thurston wrapped themselves for the press in a long stretch of red tubing to make the point that something that looks random is actually (according to Thurston) "beautiful geometry."The same idea was explored in outfits that were draped in ropes of knit tubing, or jackets piped to mirror the mathematician's graphic formulae. The twists and turns of quilted, ruched, ribbed, and shirred pieces were also Thurston-inspired. Maybe it was the rigor of mathematical thought that loaned the collection more structure and elegance than it's had previously. It was especially obvious in spectacular coats and jackets, like the funnel-collared coat in orange tweed; or a cocoon of tweed woven with silver lamé; or a biker jacket, also in tweed. The cocoon shape appeared again in layered knits that were as fine as mousseline. And, speaking of fine, the very last piece sealed the deal on a splendid collection. It was a coat made from squares of translucent black organdy, stitched with stars that looked to be shining.Two decades ago, in the same venue, Romeo Gigli transfixed Paris with a show so rich and romantic that it moved its audience to tears. Maybe that didn't happen today, but, at the very least, Fujiwara used his inspiration to blend art and science in a manner so rich and romantic, it stirred the emotions in a way that reminded us of Gigli.
4 March 2010
"What's new?" is the most fundamental question in fashion, and it looked like Dai Fujiwara had an answer for it when he called his latest collection for Issey Miyake News Mix. Except that he actually meant North, East, West, and South—all points of the compass that inspired his prints, textures, and silhouettes. There is scarcely much fashion news in ethnic borrowings, and Fujiwara's pell-mell mix of everything from Celtic motifs to Pakistani myths to Japanese artisanal dyeing techniques occasionally veered toward the incoherent side of random, with macramélike mesh and a brocade coat-dress sharing the catwalk. Still, in isolation, there were winning pieces, like the caftan bordered in blue with an eggshell shade coloring the fabric as though the dye had run, or a floating black silk gown with a more traditional Japanese motif. And, as usual, there was no denying the ingenuity of much of the patchworking and hand-painting. Adding to the random feel was the way the models roamed backward and forward across the square of the catwalk. For the finale, they started making sense, falling into a rhythm for one last turn in a series of beautiful dresses that encapsulated all the elements of Fujiwara's global vision. It was a lovely moment, one that made even Joanna Newsom's mewing on the soundtrack appealing.
1 October 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
24 June 2009
If you want to demonstrate the high-performance properties of your clothing, an extreme sport presents an obvious opportunity. Dai Fujiwara collaborated with karate masters on his new collection for Issey Miyake, developing fabrics and shapes that could take a licking and keep on ticking. During the show, the results were put to the test by those same masters (one man and three women, including a pair of French twins straight out of a Bond movie). The high-octane physicality of their performances was dazzling—the fact it didn't overpower the rest of Fujiwara's clothes underscored the strength of this collection. In a season full of references (twenties, forties, and, of course, eighties), it was refreshing to see something that looked so contemporary.Pleating, a Miyake signature, was used here in concertinalike fashion on sleeves and pant legs, articulating movement in odd places like forearms and calves. The same kinetic principle was reflected in the engineered prints used for dresses, jackets, and pants, as well as in the diagonal seaming of androgynous tailoring, and the patchwork leggings. All of it suggested the body tautly moving beneath. Miyake himself was a poetanda technician when he helmed his own label. It was plain to see that Fujiwara tends more to the latter inclination, but a final group of light-as-air outfits, fluttering like delicate piles of striped hankies, evoked the pure poetry of the master.
5 March 2009
Let's assume the World Cup is behind fashion's current fascination with all things athletic, because it's clearly a global phenomenon. Naoki Takizawa weighed in with a Japanese take in his last collection as the creative director of Issey Miyake, but he adopted a very genteel stance, claiming inspiration from the green of playing fields and the white of chalk lines, tokens to him of an era before ESPN and multimillion-dollar contracts. His chosen color scheme played out in the green detailing on saddle shoes, the green top-stitching on a white jacket, and the chalky white of a pair of tracksuit-styled leather pants.Inspired perhaps by the numbers on a scoreboard, he blew up the numerals on his coats and jackets until they had an almost abstract graphic quality (witness the huge "7" on a car coat). And it wouldn't be a Miyake collection if there weren't some tricky fabrics. Here, shiny suit linings were used for a pajamalike two-piece, Japanese paper was hand-knit into an artisanal top, and a white suit had been hand-painted (in green, of course) with a floral motif and then washed, making the dye bleed quite intriguingly. Takizawa now advances to the majors in his own right. His replacement comes from the Miyake design studio's farm team.
4 July 2006
On the brightly hued sheets of paper that awaited guests on their chairs, Naoki Takizawa claimed addiction to color as a personal trait, which made the somber opening of his latest collection for Issey Miyake something of a surprise. After the show, he mentioned that black is, as far as he's concerned, one end of the spectrum. By then, though, no one needed reassurance from Takizawa about his true preferences. Not only was he wearing the orange side out on his reversible blouson, but the clothes he had sent down the runway had shown where his heart lies.The love of color was particularly clear in the final passage of vivid Jacquard jackets, coats, and pants, with the models carrying huge armfuls of flowers. But leading up to that moment, Takizawa had steadily leaked his favorite shades into the collection: a pale aqua parka, an orange Puffa waistcoat, a Cat-in-the-Hat striped sweater (with cat ears on the matching hat). He also put his own spin on the military influence that has been intensifying elsewhere this season, with a cutaway soldier's jacket in orange and an Air Force blouson in a deep purple-y blue.Takizawa stuck with the gently tailored silhouette that makes his clothes so attractive to a certain shape (and age) of man. But this time, the seam treatments that are something of a signature for him had a different twist: they were inspired by a Tibetan practice whereby seams are expanded with inserts of fabric as a child grows or clothes are handed down. So jackets and knitwear had contrasting strips of pattern and texture running down their sides and backs. The effect was charming.
26 January 2006
Naoki Takizawa had several inspirations for the Issey Miyake spring 2006 collection, ranging from abstract art to the gentlemanly sports of golf and cricket. Paint smeared in the models' hair suggested an artist absentmindedly wiping his brush on his head; seams looked drawn on with chalk; the stripes on a linen blazer had a hand-painted quality; and the whites in the collection looked suitable for batting at Brideshead.On a less conceptual level, Takizawa stated his intention to create menswear that was "playful, elegant and rational," and it was a delight to see him succeed. Ease is a word that is much over-used in the fashion lexicon, but for once, the clothes really justified the term. Jackets were flatteringly tailored to skim the torso, not clench it. Trousers were full, either pleated to achieve the '20s- and '30s-style elegance that Takizawa sought, or pajama-casual with a drawstring and worn with spectator shoes. There were a few of the fabric conceits one expects from Miyake (a black check shirt worn to red at the shoulders and elbows, for instance, or a jacket with creases ironed into the back), but nothing jarred. In fact, Takizawa could easily have added "seductive" to his trio of intentions.
10 July 2005
Naoki Takizawa, who took over the design reigns at Issey Miyake in 1993, maintained his master's reputation for experimentation. But in a season that has so far opted for a cautious conservatism, Takizawa, too, clearly decided it was time to stick with tradition. He did, however, call his show "Idiosyncratic Dandyism," and the intriguing name was reflected on the runway.The collection was built around menswear classics—the suit, the jacket, the trenchcoat—but the craft of the clothes was emphasized with a subtle artisanal flourish in the form of a contrast cross-stitching on jacket and trouser seams (cream stitches on a black suit, for example, or black stitches on a pair of cream trousers). The same stitching also ran all round the hem of a duffel coat and appeared as a broken pinstripe on a gray wool jacket. It gave each garment the effect of being slightly unfinished yet also worn in—very much in keeping with the erstwhile essence of Miyake's own designs. (The shoes also had a lived-in quality.) The dandy theme was evident in the outerwear: a long wool coat with a tuxedo lapel, the wool cape and cream blanket cloak that closed the show, even a hooded puffer jacket lined in fake fur dyed a deep burnt orange. The abiding impression left by this collection? Intelligently designed clothes for normal-size men rather than reedy fashion models.
27 January 2005
Issey Miyakestarted experimenting with machine-made pleats in 1988 and launched his lightweight Pleats Please Issey Miyake line in 1993, which was innovative on both construction and textile fronts. Traditionally pleats are made before a garment is cut and sewn. Miyake reversed that process, creating pleated garments from single lengths of polyester sized two to three times larger than their final form (to account for heat shrinkage). The designer then folded the garments as if for storage; only then were they wrapped in paper and put through a machine that forms permanent pleats using heat and pressure.Miyake’s mostly pastel-hued Spring 1995 show featured plenty of folds, presented to 8th-century Asian music performed live by the Liu Ensemble, who, like the models, were pleat-clad to show, Miyake toldThe New York Times, “that there is just one world for everyone.” Indeed there was a fusion of East and West throughout in silhouettes that borrowed from Noh theater as well as bikers. Miyake’s architectural and dramatic Minaret dresses referenced paper lanterns and Paul Poiret’s famous lampshade dress. The most magical and uplifting moment occurred about halfway through, when a group of barefoot models stood in place as their pleated and hooped Minaret dresses bounced, in Slinky-like fashion, up and down, up and down, around their slender forms.
14 October 1994