Issey Miyake

Miyake defined an era in Japan's modern history, reaching stardom in the 1970s with his origami-like pleats that transformed usually crass polyester into ...

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was a star as soon as he hit the European runways. Miyake kept his family life private, and survivors are not known. His down-to-earth clothing was meant to celebrate the human body regardless of race, build, size or age.

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.

The pioneering Japanese designer leaves behind a legacy of innovative fashion design.

In 1999, he introduced the A-POC range, a return to his original A Piece of Cloth concept. When I studied fashion history in the 2000s it was as if it only existed in London, Paris, Milan and New York but this “new wave” of Japanese designers paved the way for other international designers to follow. This is evident in his many innovations, especially in the way he blended his Japanese heritage with his European and North American experiences. He was celebrated for clothing that responded to the body in movement and which was conceptual in design but also completely appropriate for the everyday. There’s much for the next generation of fashion designers to learn from Miyake’s body of work, from his innovative reinvention of Japanese clothing traditions to his bravery in embracing new textile technologies and silhouettes. He witnessed the revolutionary May 1968 protests in Paris, a series of student and worker demonstrations that resulted in improved workers’ rights and rapid social change.

Before Jobs adopted his classic black turtleneck, he approached Japanese designer Issey Miyake to see if he could create a uniform for Apple employees.

You may click on “Your Choices” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. If you click “Agree and Continue” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic.

The real beginning of the fashion-technology love affair and its legacy lies with Issey Miyake, who died last week.

It was an approach to dress later adopted by adherents including Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. Also his ability to blend soft-corner elegance and utility in not just his own style but the style of his products. Still, according to Mr. Isaacson’s book, the two men became friends, and Mr. Jobs would often visit Mr. Miyake, ultimately adopting a Miyake garment — the black mock turtleneck — as a key part of his own uniform. Mr. Miyake made him “like a hundred of them,” Mr. Jobs, who wore them until his death in 2011, said in the book. (An updated version was reintroduced in 2017 as “The Semi-Dull T.”) According to Mr. Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs,” Mr. Jobs was fascinated by the uniform jacket Mr. Miyake created for Sony workers in 1981. At that point, the whole ethos of the garment had been transformed. And then there was 132 5, which Mr. Miyaki debuted in 2010 (after he had stepped back from his day-to-day responsibilities but remained involved with his brand). Inspired by the work of computer scientist Jun Mitani, it comprised flat-pack items in complex origami folds that popped open to create three-dimensional pieces on the body. But it was his understanding and appreciation of technology and how it could be harnessed to an aesthetic point of view to create new, seductive utilities that set Mr. Miyake apart. So it went: Next came an experiment involving a continuous piece of thread fed into an industrial knitting machine to create one piece of cloth with inbuilt seams that traced different garment shapes — which could in turn be cut out as desired by the wearer, thus eliminating manufacturing detritus. By 1994, those garments made up a line of their own known as Pleats Please (later spun into a men’s wear version, Homme Plissé): a re-engineering of the classic Grecian drapes of Mario Fortuny into something both practical and weirdly fun. But it embodies his founding principles and serves as the door through which anyone not particularly interested in fashion could walk to discover the Miyake universe. He was the original champion of fashion tech.