Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake is known today as one of the most famous Japanese designers in the world, having successfully merged East and West in all his designs.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1939, Issey Miyake studied at the Tama Art University in Tokyo during which time he assembled his first fashion collection, which he titled "The Poem of Material and Stone"

In 1964 Issey Miyake graduated from the University of Tokyo. A year after that, he moved to Paris in order to study design at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. In 1966 he left to work as an assistant designer at Guy Laroche. He also worked in the studio of another great couturier Hubert de Givenchy. However, he felt out of step with the posed formality of the haute couture approach to dressing which was all that Paris could offer to women at that time. However, revolution was in the air, and such designers as Courreges and Cardin were also designing very modern clothes.

In 1969, Issey Miyake left for New York. There he worked as a designer for Geoffrey Beene, producing many ready-to-wear clothes and enjoying the city's atmosphere. He was also refining his ideas about dress and the true function of fashion.

In 1970, Miyake returned to Tokyo in order to make his ideas tangible. At first, his clothes consisted of pieces of irregularly shaped fabric which were almost suspended around the body, each piece of which could be stripped away to reveal another part of the body. He quickly moved into layering and wrapping and his unparallelled feeling for texture, mass and volume became more evident.

Miyake himself attributes much of his thinking to the influence of fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet, who, in the 1920's attempted to take clothing back to the basic shapes dictated by the qualities and textures of the fabric. She did not cut the fabric and then stitch it, so that it would fit the body, but rather, she used the body as an underframe along the lines of which the fabric hung, draped and flowed effortlessly, naturally, assuming new shapes as the body moved within the clothing.

Issey Miyake developed this concept in ways which are very beautiful to watch on the runway. In 1971 for example, Issey Miyake founded the Issey Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo. He also opened a boutique in Bloomingdales department store in New York.

During the 1970's whilst he was still based in Tokyo, Issey Miyake began to show his collections twice a year in Paris and they rapidly became fashion shows which no fashion addict could ever afford to miss.

In 1976, he presented his show "12 black girls from America", these were striking black Amazons showing his designs in Osaka, Japan which were seen by 15,000.people. In 1977, he put together "Fly with Issey Miyake" in Tokyo for an audience of 22,000 people.

Throughout the 1980's and the 1990's Issey Miyake's designs have become increasingly well-known. His is now a world-wide empire and his style is extremely popular.

In 1995, several designers joined together in a project in order to illustrate certain characters from films. It is Issey Miyake who drew Pocahontas the red Indian heroine of the Disney cartoon film.

Issey Miyake's designs for 1996, were all based on the traditional Japanese kimonos.

In the year 2000, following 30 years at the forefront of design, Issey Miyake announced that he would be handing over the reins of his ready-to-wear Empire to his right-hand man Naoki Takizawa (born 1960) who has been working with him since 1989. He studied in Japan at the Kuwasawa Design School. For Spring 2000, Takizawa gave the Miyake main line new direction, with cropped jackets and fitted shift dresses in simple pared-down silhouettes and some very fluid shapes.

The Style of Issey Miyake

Miyake's skills with fabric are rooted in his knowledge of traditional Japanese fabrics and fabric-production methods. The ascendancy of denim in the sixties and seventies turned his attention to the Japanese workwear fabrics: ticking stripes, heavy cottons, and quilting. He incorporated all of these into his work both in their original form and in some wonderfully elaborated forms, waffle textures, heavy coarse weaves, rich seersucker effects, wrinkled, crinkled, primitive pleating which were occasionally smocked.

Put together with Issey Miyake's sophisticated sense of colour, the effect of all this sensuous texture was completely and very extremely fresh. Textured fabrics when used by other designers, tended to be conventionally rich - velvet, plain, panne or printed, brocade, damask, corduroy or applique work, embroidery or lace, nubbled or hairy tweed. Even when they were used in fresh unexpected ways, other designers could not compete with the fabrics that Miyake had developed, which responded well to being intricately cut, seamed, darted and very well fitted. This is very consistent with his vision. He says " I like to work in the spirit of the Japanese Kimono, between the body and the fabric there exists only a contact which is only approximate."

Issey Miyake does not use the kimono itself as many Western designers do, to add a touch of exoticism. He rather prefers to borrow its inner attributes of ease, adaptability and respect for the fabric and the patterns and shapes in space which it can create when the body moves within it.

Miyake's use of wrapping and tying techniques for the fastening of his clothes is also based in the Japanese tradition. The kimono has no closure and it is closed by tying the obi around the waist.

He generally likes to create clothes like those of 18th century Buddhist priests, with patchwork rectangles which were meant to suggest the humility of tatters, though they were actually stitched from the finest and most refined of antique brocades. Miyake tends to refine and very much pass on the inherently Japanese vision. His very loose, even formless clothes tend to mock the perfectly-toned 21st century body, thus making fashion retrospective.


 

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