Miyake Issey
Japanese designer, born in Hiroshima. His mother died of radiation poisoning years after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city
Miyake, Issey (1938). Japanese designer, born in Hiroshima. His mother died of radiation poisoning years after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. He is a designer with a rare loyalty to the purity of his own vision: an encounter between elements of the East and the audacity of, and search for, the West. Right from his first Paris runway show (1973), the aestheticism of his linear, geometric shapes developed into austere metamorphoses, accompanied by the stratification of the fabrics and his moving drapery, sometimes inspired by ancient Japanese costumes and at others by futuristic forms of delicate armour. After completing his degree at Tama University (1964), the following year he was already in Paris for a fashion apprenticeship with Laroche (1966) and Givenchy (1968), which he completed with two years in New York at Geoffrey Beene: all significant names in contributing to the cut, taste and distinctiveness of the young Miyake, whose first name means “a life” and surname “three houses.” After his runway debut in New York (1971) he felt ready to return to Paris. His Japanese stylism — already admired at the beginning of the 1970s in the Parisian prêt-à-porter environment alongside the colorfulness of Yamamoto and the enchantment of Kenzo’s extraordinary little white shirts — was characterized by a rarefied elegance evident in his every runway show.
Miyake Issey
The attention he pays to textiles, which are often produced exclusively for each collection, to their weave and muted colors, in indefinable variations of white, gray and strong tones rendered in somber hues, makes his collections unique and always unusual. They follow a consistent path, yet at the same time are sensitive to changes. After almost 30 years, he is an irreplaceable presence in prêt-à-porter fashion across the world. Miyake sells approximately 200,000 garments every year and more than 100 factories in Japan work for him. In Fall 1998, the Cartier Foundation in Paris dedicated a large exhibition to him in a space designed by the architect Jean Nouvel. Miyake himself chose the title: Making Things. On this occasion, Philippe Trétiack wrote for Elle magazine: “He has never cease to search, interrogate, scrutinize his materials and he has drawn various replies and signs in order to design what might be the clothing of the future. A tailor of the wind, a poet of delicacy, an architect of a feather-light armor for the next millennium, Miyake, year after year, is becoming the master, the guru of the most fluid modernity.” For the Spring-Summer 2000 collection, significantly called A-Poc (A Piece of Cloth), a single piece of cloth became a long or short skirt, a T-“shirt, bikini, socks, and gloves.