Issey Miyake, Japanese designer who invented iconic Pleats Please, has died (2024)

The life of Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, who died in Tokyo on Friday, August 5 of liver cancer at the age of 84, will be remembered as one of the most singular in the history of fashion in the second half of the 20th century. His was a journey that saw him create, invent, travel, dream, use all possible resources, artistic or technological, all for his clothes. His ambition was to design clothing for everyone, to imagine new outfits that would have the practicality and simplicity of a pair of jeans or a T-shirt. He constantly looked to surpass the limits of his profession. And so he invented a signature, an immediately identifiable style, which stood apart from that of his contemporaries, with a taste for bright colors and pleated fabrics.

In 1986, in the pages of Le Monde, Colette Godard, theater critic, described the effect produced by his outfits in these terms: "With Issey Miyake, the eye is amazed, wandering in search of a sign of recognition. But everything is deceptive. The draping, starting from who knows where, ending nowhere, roll up, slide, slip into folds that fly into scarves, stoles, and flatten themselves at an angle, crushing the busts, then take off and swell around the hips before flowing into trains that lift, revealing tights that imitate torn mesh."

Enriched with three cultures

If everything was an illusion, it was perhaps because Miyake had been confronted with the harshest reality in his early childhood. He was 6 years old when his hometown, Hiroshima, was bombed. He was 3 kilometers from the epicenter of the atomic explosion, perched on the hills from where he witnessed the nuclear disaster. His mother died from her burns, and he himself suffered from a bone disease that marked him for life. He grew up in traumatized post-war Japan, where American influence affected all areas, including ready-to-wear clothing. No doubt this was the source of his obsession with inventing archetypes, as American popular culture does, and the essential preoccupation of his future career, as summarized by journalist Caroline Rousseau, in 2016, in Le Monde: "If the Americans were able to impose this daily wardrobe, how can a Japanese person respond?"

After beginning his studies in Tokyo, Miyake left for France in the mid-1960s and enrolled in the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He was soon working for Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. The French couture scene was still very quiet, and he left for New York, where he frequented the art world, which was then in the middle of a major reinvention. With three cultures bolstering him, he launched his own brand in Tokyo in the early 1970s. Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of the American edition of Vogue, endorsed him.

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