Issey Miyake

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

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

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

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

Issey Miyake's clothing is both theatrical and practical. The Japanese designer has died aged 84.

The jackets are unlined and embrace the body in unexpected ways. Once unrolled and put on the body, they spring back to life. The textiles have an unexpected tactility next to the skin. Miyake, on the other hand, tested the zeitgeist by suggesting we use clothes to make our bodies and appearances suit our needs. Clothes were knitted in three dimensions in a continuous tube using computerised knitting technology as a whole and from a single thread. All questioned Eurocentric views of fashion and beauty.

Japan's Kyodo News outlet announced that fashion designer, Issey Miyake, passed on 5 August in a hospital in Tokyo...

And it was during this time that Miyake began to experiment with the Fortuny pleat, which would offer his wearers the freedom to move while signalling all the cachet of high-end design. It would be 10 years until Miyake launched his menswear equivalent, Homme Plissé, which united performers, gallerists, musicians, and fashion-heads in elasticated waists, comfort, and craft. Following a short stint in New York, where he became acquainted with artists like Christo and Robert Rauschenberg, he returned to Tokyo in 1970 to establish the Miyake Design Studio,” says Dazed. “I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic,” he wrote in the New York Times in 2008. Alongside the likes of Rei Kawakubo and Kansai Yamamoto, Miyake was a protagonist of Japanese design, jostling to get a footing on the world’s stage throughout the 1980s. In 1997 he formally retired from fashion.