Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake (1938-2022) was one of the most important Japanese fashion designers. His style, capable of combining great respect for traditional Japanese styles with a great openness to experimental materials of modern origin, led him to achieve great commercial success starting from the second half of the 80s until he became one of the most recognizable brands in the world of international fashion. Born in Hiroshima, he was in the city when the US dropped the atomic bomb there at the end of World War II, so much so that he was left with a slight limp for life from the aftermath of radiation. Despite this, his works exude optimism and confidence for the future, right from his Parisian debut as an apprentice in the studios of Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. Miyake begins presenting his collections starting from 1971, dividing himself between Tokyo and New York, becoming very well known in the following years for the updates he managed to make to the pleating technique, which he created according to new methodologies that allowed greater possibilities of movement and more resistance to washing. Folds and three-dimensionality are the trademark of his clothes until the early 90s, when in the new Pleats Please line he combines clothes that are characterized above all by the drawings on the surface, created by artists such as Yasumasa Morimura and Nobuyoshi Araki. In the 90s he left the creative direction of his company (in 1994 for the men's line and in 1999 for the men's line) to concentrate on research and experimentation on fabrics, the most notable result of which will be the A-POC line (acronym for A Piece of Cloth), in which numerous apparently identical clothes are made from a single very long fabric which will then be taken out of the frame directly in the shop and adapted to the buyer's needs. Issey Miyake's most famous foray into the world of design, which also earned him a Compasso d'Oro in 2014, is the In-Ei lamp collection created for Artemide. He also worked with Iittala.