Encounters · No. 6

A Piece of Cloth

Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated.

By Bergotte

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On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing close enough to the centre of Hiroshima to see the flash. He survived. His mother did not — she died three years later from radiation sickness, her body slowly consuming itself from the inside. For decades, Miyake declined to speak publicly about any of this. He was a fashion designer, he said, and fashion was about the future, and he preferred to look forward. In 2009, when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and there was talk of a visit to Hiroshima, Miyake wrote an op-ed for the New York Times — his only extended public statement on the subject — in which he described, with great precision and very few words, what he had seen. He wrote it, he said, because he felt he finally had to. He did not write it again.

What Miyake did instead, across a career of more than fifty years, was make clothing. Not clothing as decoration or status or the performance of identity, but clothing as a philosophical proposition: as the negotiation between a body and the world it inhabits, as the space between skin and shelter, as something that ought to move when you move and breathe when you breathe and ask as little of you as possible while giving as much. He did not talk about Hiroshima in interviews about fashion. But the insistence — the almost moral urgency — with which he pursued lightness, freedom of movement, the liberation of the body from the constraints that clothing traditionally imposed on it, has the quality of someone who had learned, very young and very specifically, what it means to be a body that survives.

Clothing as a philosophical proposition: as the negotiation between a body and the world it inhabits. He pursued lightness with an almost moral urgency — with the quality of someone who had learned, very young, what it means to be a body that survives.

Between Two Worlds

Miyake was born in 1938 in Hiroshima, studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, and arrived in Paris in 1965, enrolling at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He was twenty-seven, had never made a garment professionally, and had chosen, with characteristic deliberateness, to enter the most tradition-bound and hierarchical industry in the world at its most tradition-bound and hierarchical address. He worked as an apprentice at Guy Laroche and then at Hubert de Givenchy, absorbing the grammar of Parisian couture — the construction, the fit, the architecture of the tailored garment — with the attention of someone who intends to understand a thing completely before deciding what to do differently.

He went next to New York, to Geoffrey Beene, whose American pragmatism — clothes should work, clothes should move, clothes should not require their wearer to hold their breath — gave him a counterweight to the French tradition. By the time he founded Issey Miyake in Tokyo in 1970, he had assembled in his head a complete picture of what Western fashion was and what it valued, and he had decided to begin somewhere else entirely.

That somewhere else was the body. Not the idealised, socially constructed body that couture dressed — the narrow-waisted, carefully proportioned figure around which a tailored suit was engineered — but the actual, variable, moving body that people inhabited. Miyake’s early collections used heavy cotton and traditional Japanese textiles in ways that wrapped and draped rather than constructed and constrained. The clothes looked, to eyes trained on European fashion, strange: too large, too simple, insufficiently finished. To eyes trained on the Japanese tradition of the kimono — a garment designed to accommodate any body, to move with the body rather than shaping it — they made perfect sense.

Pleats

In 1993, Miyake launched Pleats Please. The concept was simple and, in retrospect, obviously right: garments made from polyester that was cut large, stitched, and then run through a heat press that permanently pleated the fabric, compressing it to its final size. The resulting clothes were light enough to fold into a small square, resilient enough to be washed in a machine and hung to dry without ironing, and flexible enough to fit almost any body without alteration. They came in colours — deep saturated tones, clean brights — that did not fade. They could be rolled into a bag and emerge unwrinkled. They were, as garments, extraordinarily practical. They were also, worn on a body in motion, extraordinarily beautiful: the pleats catching light and releasing it as the fabric moved, the surface alive with a kind of fine-grained animation that flat fabric does not have.

Pleats Please was not, in the fashion world’s terms, a luxury product. It was priced accessibly. It was sold in its own shops with their own clean, functional aesthetic. It was designed to be worn by real people in real life, which is to say by people who carry bags and sit on public transport and do not have household staff to manage their wardrobes. This was a political position as much as a commercial one. Miyake had always been impatient with the assumption, built into the structure of the fashion industry, that beautiful clothes were a privilege — that access to garments that fitted well and moved well and lasted and gave genuine pleasure was something you earned with money. Pleats Please was an argument, made in polyester, that this assumption was wrong.

Pleats Please was a political position as much as a commercial one — an argument, made in polyester, that beautiful, functional clothing should not be a privilege.

A-POC

In 1999, working with the designer and engineer Dai Fujiwara, Miyake launched A-POC — A Piece of Cloth. The concept was more radical still: a continuous tube of knitted fabric, produced by a computerised loom, from which the wearer could cut their own garments. The tube contained, embedded in its structure, the outlines of sleeves, necklines, hems — you cut along the indicated lines and the garment emerged, the edges finishing themselves without fraying. No waste. No assembly. No labour beyond the cutting. The wearer became, in a limited but genuine sense, the maker.

A-POC was received as a conceptual gesture, which it was, but it was also a practical proposition: a serious attempt to imagine how clothing might be made and distributed differently, with less waste, less labour, more direct connection between the material and the person wearing it. The fashion industry, which runs on the mystification of process — on the idea that the making of clothes is too complex and specialised to be understood by the people who wear them — was not entirely comfortable with this. Miyake was comfortable with their discomfort. He had always been more interested in the question of what clothing was for than in the question of what it should look like.

His research studio, which he called the Reality Lab, continued after his nominal retirement from designing — he stepped back from the runway in 1997, handing the Issey Miyake line first to Naoki Takizawa and later to Yoshiyuki Miyamae, while continuing to oversee the research work himself. The studio produced the 132 5. line, in which flat geometric shapes, designed using computer modelling, were folded into three-dimensional garments that collapsed back to flat for storage and transport. The shapes were derived from origami and from the mathematics of folding, and the clothes had, when worn, an angular, almost architectural quality — as if someone had convinced a building to go for a walk.

The Turtleneck

There is a footnote to Miyake’s career that has achieved, through repetition, a slightly disproportionate fame: the black turtleneck. In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs asked Miyake — whom he had met through mutual friends in the design world — to make him a personal uniform. Miyake made him a hundred black turtlenecks. Jobs wore them for the rest of his life. The story is told, usually, as an illustration of Jobs’s genius for simplification, his rejection of unnecessary choice. It is that. But it is also, from Miyake’s end, a characteristic act: the belief that the right garment, made well from good materials and designed to last, should be something you never have to think about again — that clothing at its best disappears into life rather than demanding attention from it.

This idea — that the purpose of a garment is to free its wearer, not to define them — runs through everything Miyake made. It is the opposite of fashion as it is usually understood, which is to say as a system for producing constant novelty and constant desire, for ensuring that what you wore last season is no longer adequate this one. Miyake was not uninterested in novelty — the Research Lab existed precisely to find new things — but the novelty he was interested in was technical rather than decorative, a matter of what cloth could do rather than what it could signal.

Clothing at its best disappears into life rather than demanding attention from it. This idea runs through everything Miyake made — and it is the opposite of fashion as it is usually understood.

Ma

There is a concept in Japanese aesthetics — ma — that describes the meaningful pause, the productive emptiness, the space between things that gives the things themselves their definition. It applies to music, to architecture, to the arrangement of objects in a room: the gap is not nothing; the gap is where meaning lives. Miyake never used this word to describe his work, as far as I know, but it describes his work precisely. His garments are full of deliberate space — between the fabric and the body, between the structure of the garment and the structure of the person inside it. The clothes do not grip. They hover. They suggest. They allow the body its own logic, its own movement, its own life.

He died in August 2022, from liver cancer, at the age of eighty-four. The obituaries were generous and accurate and somehow insufficient, because the thing that was hardest to convey was not the catalogue of achievements — the Pleats, the A-POC, the collaborations, the exhibitions, the retrospectives — but the quality of the ambition behind them. He had wanted to make clothing that felt like freedom. This sounds, stated as an abstract intention, fairly ordinary. As a lifelong practice — pursued with rigour and intelligence and a stubbornness about essentials that never softened — it was something much rarer.

There is a photograph of Miyake taken late in his life, at his studio in Tokyo, in which he is wearing, as he almost always wore, simple clothes in a single colour — linen, loose, nothing superfluous. He is smiling. The room around him is clean and light and full of fabric and models and the paraphernalia of making. He looks like a man who has spent his life doing exactly what he intended, which is perhaps the rarest kind of portrait there is.

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Works referenced: Issey Miyake East Meets West (1978); Pleats Please (launched 1993); A-POC (launched 1999, with Dai Fujiwara); 132 5. (launched 2010). Irving Penn, Issey Miyake (1988). Issey Miyake, “A Flash of Memory,” New York Times, 9 November 2009. This essay is part of an ongoing series, Encounters, on artists whose practice cannot be easily categorised.