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There have been seven A-POC demos to date, and as the concept has evolved,
so too have the design directions. Early versions like King & Queen
featured simple jersey forms and the production of shirts, skirts, hats,
and bags on one section of material. A-POC demos during the past year have
become more emphatically expressive and decorative. The Zoo group, for example,
includes whimsical turtle, octopus, monkey, teddy bear, and panther-like
outfits. On a higher-minded note, Berlin Homage and Berlin District
are wearable paeans to the architecture of Berlin, the skyline of which
seems to change as much as the A-POC collection. "In terms of dressing
women, Issey has very little to do with nostalgic styles," notes jewelry
designer Ted Muehling, who collaborated with Miyake on accessorizing a collection
in Paris in the late 1970s and to this day admires the Japanese master's
creative freedom and unfettered imagination. "You need to be a fairly
strong person to wear the clothing, someone with your own power and self-awareness.
It's definitely not trophy-wife material."
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The A-POC store in Paris (2000; top left), Tokyo (2000; top right), and the Manhattan
flagship store in Tribeca (2001; bottom), which was designed
collaboratively by Issey Miyake, Frank Gehry, and Gordon Kipping.
Photos: Top left, Morgane Le Gali; top right, Nacasa & Partners Inc.;
bottom, Paul Warchol.
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Much has been written about how architecture has given new life to retail
fashion by augmenting, heightening, or stimulating its display into sheer
entertainment. Miyake's compatriot Rei Kawakubo's tubelike store in New
York's Chelsea district is a regular stop on the art gallery circuit, even
for those who couldn't possibly afford a Comme des Garçons suit.
And Rem Kool-haas's much anticipated Prada stores posit such spaces as "shoe
theaters" and "peep shows" to make the association between
shopping and entertainment even more explicit.
Miyake has long looked to architecture for inspiration, collaborating with
international masters such as Isamu Noguchi and Shiro Kuramata and exhibiting
his work in Jean Nouvel's Cartier Foundation. Parallels can certainly be
drawn between Miyake's clothing and architecture writ large, although he
himself is careful to draw distinctions between what he sees as hard and
soft media. "The final form of clothing design is determined by
the way the body moves," he says. "Unlike architecture and furniture,
clothing design cannot be accomplished without the wearer's participation."
Miyake is, however, experimenting with furniture that demands the body's
cooperation. His beanbag-reminiscent Midas, for example, is not only humanoid
but takes on its fullest form when sat upon or draped over the body like
a cape.
Not all of Miyake's oeuvre is so warm and fuzzy, though. Often Miyake's
means to beautiful ends involve distress and duress. Nancy Knox, the U.S.
liaison to Miyake Design Studio, talks about how Miyake's oeuvre is all
about flux and impermanence and how it is meant to shock, surprise,
and delight--maybe even horrify. An account of the processes that Miyake
has put fabric through over the years certainly reads like a list of torments:
twisting, crushing, crumpling, pressing, shrinking, cutting under heat.
The resulting clothing looks purified by these rites of passage--elegantly
but eternally marked, as Miyake's pleats and twists are guaranteed to maintain
their formal integrity. In one literal instance of beauty from ashes, the
Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang set fire to a dragon-shaped arrangement
of gunpowder on an assemblage of Pleats Please outfits in the opening
ceremony of Miyake's 1998 Making Things exhibition at the Cartier
Foundation, in Paris. Later the burn patterns were reproduced with advanced
printing techniques onto pristine ensembles that were affixed to the
museum's windows. Perhaps the fact that Miyake was a seven-year-old boy
when the atomic bomb was dropped on his native Hiroshima has led him to
understand the cycle of life better than most.
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Clockwise from top: the evolving A-POC logo designed by
Pascal Roulin; Issey Miyake; One Piece, featured in last year's
exhibition A-POC Making at the Vitra Design Museum in Berlin; an
early model of the A-POC collection, shown as part of the Issey Miyake
Autumn/Winter 1998 Collection; and Eskimo.
Photos: Clockwise from top right: Tatsuro Hirose; Yasuaki Yoshinaga;
Yasuaki Yoshinaga; Pascal Roulin
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A literal manifestation of Miyake's destruction/construction dichotomy is
at the very center of his Tribeca flagship. In distinction to so many
New York stores that usher potential customers from the noise and bustle
of the street into a consumer sanctum sanctorum, visiting the Tribeca outlet
is like entering the mind of a restless genius. Housed in three floors
of an 1888 warehouse, the store features a 25-foot titanium "tornado"
created by architect Frank Gehry that seems to have ripped its way from
the ground floor to a lower level. "I'd say the store is an antidote
to all the minimalism out there," Gehry says with a laugh. "I
like minimalism, but it's become this cold, cold thing; and Issey's on a
relentless search for form that has spirit and life to it."
In a seemingly ironic architectural turn of events, Gehry's twister--all
tortured metal and upward sweep--is one of the only permanent fixtures
in the store, which was designed largely by Gordon Kipping, a former Gehry
student from Yale who opened his own studio, G TECTS LLC, and was recommended
to Miyake when Gehry was unable to take on the whole job. "We were
focusing more on creating a backdrop for the rest of the store than engaging
it in the same expressive manner," Kipping explains of the store, whose
other features include a ground-floor glass walkway diagonally screened
in safety-strip manner that provides peek-a-boo vistas of the showroom downstairs;
a stainless-steel-paneled stairway; and a Manga-reminiscent mural by the
architect's son, Alejandro Gehry (see In Production, January 2002). The
rest of the space includes glass dividers with small etched dots, wheelable
racks of brightly colored clothing, raw wooden beams--and a movable feast
of Miyake.
The fact that the Tribeca space is located just blocks away from the site
of the World Trade Center disaster is an unfortunate fact of geography.
(More upsetting perhaps--especially to Gehry--is the fact that people have
drawn comparisons between the store's titanium tornado and the crumpled
steel found at ground zero.) When asked about whether design can serve to
heal, Miyake responds with the thoughtfulness that has made him a lasting
cultural presence--despite the fact that he once said that the designer's
crowning achievement would be to disappear into anonymity. "Creation
is always an expression of life, rebirth, and energy," he explains.
"The real designer is a true optimist who confronts the future with
a sense of responsibility."
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