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Combining craft, technology, and all five senses, Issey Miyake has created
a magical clothing universe that transcends mere fashion.
By Andrea Codrington
March 2002
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Monkey is a design from Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara's A-POC clothing
line Zoo (Autumn/Winter 2001). A-POC clothes are woven into continuous
tubes of fabric; the consumer cuts them out, participating in the final
design.
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Clockwise from top left: Baguette, Queen, Mobile, Alien, Mobile & One Piece.
Photos: Top, Pascal Roulin; clockwise from top
left: Yasuaki Yoshinaga, Yasuaki Yoshinaga, Pascal Roulin, Mitsumasa
Fujitsuka, Pascal Roulin & Pascal Roulin.
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Issey Miyake may be the only clothing designer on Earth to say that he is
making fashion go away. Of course, Miyake has bridled at being labeled a
"fashion designer" since he first started constructing clothes
more than 35 years ago as a student at Tokyo's Tama Art University. Maybe
it's a hangover from having been a graphic-design student who really wanted
to make clothes but couldn't in school because it was considered women's
work. Or maybe the term today too often smacks of superficiality, cynicism,
and flash-in-the-pan trendiness--descriptions that run deeply counter
to the designer's ethos.
Most likely Miyake's discomfort with being labeled a fashion designer stems
from the fact that he is a creative polymath whose wearable work plays at
the very margins of art, architecture, and technology. He is content being
called a clothing designer, but perhaps even more so a "maker of things."
A rattan bodice forms a cage for the torso that doubles as sculpture when
not worn (Rattan Body, 1982); disks of pleated cloth accordion-fold into
dresses reminiscent of gaily colored Chinese lanterns (Flying Saucer, 1994);
a continuous roll of fabric offers up an entire wardrobe that can be removed
like dough from cookie cutters (A-POC: King & Queen, 1999).
The genius of Miyake's work is that it seamlessly merges oppositions: two-
and three-dimensional space, creation and destruction, technology and handicraft,
randomness and intentionality. As early as 1977 the famed Japanese architect
Arata Isozaki pointed to Miyake's unique position in the fashion world when
he said that his work "has had such a decisive impact on the cultural
sphere that it has given a new stimulus to all areas of design."
Miyake is a consummate collector of cultural detail and technological knowledge,
and is an arch-collaborator who works with craftspeople, installation artists,
choreographers, photographers, ceramacists, industrial designers, and architects
to piece together what has been called "visual clothing." Any
Miyake-mediated experience--whether clothing, exhibits, or stores--involves
an intense engagement with the body. "There is no basic difference
between design disciplines," he points out, "but the physically
closer the usage of discipline to the human body, the more need there is
for making use of all five senses." These days Miyake's most intimate
access to the body is through a line of clothing that, ironically, comes
close to negating his own authorship.
A-POC, a design concept that stands for "A Piece of Cloth," springs
from Miyake's long-held desire to create beauty and complexity out of absolute
simplicity. The single piece of cloth is a building block that Miyake first
started working with in the early 1970s when he presented "constructible
clothes," which featured detachable pieces that could be removed and
reattached in various configurations, or years later, a coat made of
large swaths of cloth folded and stretched to cocoon the entire body. It
is in the context of his recent A-POC work that Miyake has claimed that
"fashion has ceased to exist," freeing him from the ego trap of
authorship to "concentrate completely on the theme of joy and experimentation."
(The fact that the concept name is a homophone of epoch--a time marked
by distinct and special events--also exhibits Miyake's hope to trade in
one-off trendiness for a kind of evolutionary timeliness.)
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Le Feu
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Baguette
Photos: Top, Pacal Roulin; bottom, Yasuaki Yoshinaga
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In close collaboration with an acolyte named Dai Fujiwara and a group of
young designers, the Tokyo-based Miyake has reduced the artist's Midas touch
to complex sets of binary codes fed into a computer-aided textile machine,
resulting in clothing that can look variously minimalist, otherworldly,
or straight out of an ethnographic museum. Without understanding the technology
involved--and nobody outside the Miyake Design Studio does, given its patent-pending
status--the A-POC method is high science that seems, quite simply, like
magic: a string gets fed into a machine and, without cutting or sewing,
three-dimensional tubes of printed or woven textiles emerge in which fully
formed clothes are embedded.
Miyake, who has won just about every fashion and design award imaginable,
admits to being most flattered by a recent note from the American textile
legend Jack Lenor Larsen, who realized in the late 1950s that the cutting
and sewing necessary in clothing production was a waste of material and
human resources. The way of the future, he wrote to Miyake, was "a
complete garment without consumer sewing and with automated sizing... Neither
I nor anyone else until now has realized that prognosis."
In a further avoidance of waste and fashion-world trappings, A-POC is presented
in "demos"--not conventional seasonal collections--and on mannequins
or gigantic rolls of cloth rather than on strutting models. Customers who
visit A-POC stores in Tokyo and Paris or New York's recently opened Tribeca
flagship are able to customize their clothing with help from salespeople
or with a pair of sharp scissors at home. This craft aesthetic is central
to Miyake. "There is no clothing design that appeals to people's hearts
without using the latest function created both by the advancement of technology
and by the warmth of human hands," he says.
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