"From the beginning I thought about working with the body in movement, the space between the body and clothes. I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh." Issey Miyake
Issey Miyake is the first Japanese designer to gain international fame. Miyake was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1938. He studied at the Tama Art University in Tokyo and at the Syndicat de la Couture in Paris, and worked in Paris (designing for Guy Laroche and Givenchy) and New York City (designing for Geoffrey Beene) before founding his own design studio in Tokyo in 1970.
Miyake has been the world leader in merging art and technology in fashion. Miyake's early creations were variations on traditional Japanese themes, but by 1976 he had begun radical experimentation and highly innovative designs, including being the first designer to use ultrasuede.
Miyake has always focused on the ideal of trying to make a garment from a single piece of cloth, and in 2003 he stopped producing haute couture entirely to focus on inventing fashions.
"I became a fashion designer to make clothes for the people, not to be a top couturier in the French tradition." Issey Miyake
In the early '90s, Miyake singlehandedly popularized the pleat in high fashion, by making a revolutionary improvement in how to pleat clothing.
Miyake's Pleats Please garments are made of oversize pieces of fabric (usually 2 1/2 to 3 times larger than the finished size) that are sewn together and hand-fed, sandwiched between two sheets of paper, through a heat press.
This gives them permanent pleats and leaves them ready to wear (and needing very little care). Miyake turned the designs of his clothing lines over to Naoki Takizawa during the 1990s to focus on research.
"Certain people think that the definition of design is the beauty of the useful, but in my own work I want to integrate feelings, emotion. You have to put life into it." Issey Miyake
In 1997, Miyake and design engineer Dai Fujiwara invented a method of weaving entire pieces of clothing at once, with no sewing needed. Essentially, the clothes are produced by weaving a single piece of thread into a long flattened tube, from which they can be cut out.
Miyake even showcased this fabric at a fashion show by having a line of models walk out in clothing made from this fabric that had not yet been fully cut out - so they were all connected together like a line of paper dolls. Miyake named the design process, and the fabric A-POC, standing for A Piece of Cloth.
Clothes produced by the A-POC process do not unravel and are customizable by the wearer. Miyake has expanded the A-POC process to new types of fabric, and recently debuted home furnishings made using the same process, as well as reversible jeans.
Miyake has won numerous fashion awards, including the Neiman Marcus Award and the Council of Fashion Designers of America International Award.