L’Uomo: interview with Issey Miyake

There’s incessant talk about disruptive fashion innovations nowadays, but let’s be honest: more often than not, it is just blah-blah, communication, or, to pillage the harsh

expression from the unforgivable Gottfried Benn, a coating of varnish over nothingness. Change, true change, can only start from the way things are made. It is clothing built differently that ignites new attitudes and behaviours. Disruption and even politics, in other words, matter only when they are in the seams and shapes of clothing, not in the storytelling. Issey Miyake, one of fashion’s most enduring and prolific inventors, and a veritable innovator, calls his activity, rather straightforwardly and matter-of-factly, but also quite humbly, “making things”. That is exactly what he does, no storytelling needed: he makes things meant to be worn, challenging and channelling innovations in both construction and fabrication. Miyake’s prime obsession, in fact, is the idea of creating pieces that seamlessly adapt to the needs of the wearer, making life easier. He has never needed too many theories, or preposterous declarations, to do so. As early as 1983, in an insightful manifesto published in the seminal monograph Bodyworks, Miyake stated, “I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things, to utter too many words is to regulate himself, a frightening prospect.”

A portrait of Issey Miyake.

Since he established Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo in 1970, Issey Miyake has been constantly moving forward. Resolutely rooted in the moment, he kept looking ahead rather than back, while nurturing an acute awareness of traditions and the past. Miyake, in fact, has shaped the future of dressing by reconnecting fashion-making with shapes that are ancestral and almost primeval in their unremitting pureness, giving them a technologic spin.

The underground show of Issey Miyake Men A/W 1989 Paris Collection.

His quest is guided by the urge to create radical clothing solutions that respond to specific functions: forms that are inventive yet practical, things that make existence effortless. This balance of creativity and pragmatism is an unprecedented creative achievement, if one considers how much designers can be carried away by the pleasure of sacrificing function to form in the name of originality. Indeed, it is the mark of Miyake’s very own, and quite unique, excellence.

Models dancing to demonstrate the movement of the Homme Plissé show in S/S 2021’s video presentation.

Such excellence has been globally appreciated and has been the recipient of a number of awards throughout a career that spans many decades. However, it is mostly the womenswear that has been put to the forefront, for its daring rewriting of the grammar of dressing. Miyake himself once said that while womenswear is more advanced, menswear needs to be more realistic. Nonetheless, determined to invent and make things also in this field, Miyake used the limitations of menswear as a genre to build an equally personal grammar that essentially revolves around movement and comfort. In this regard, it is not by chance that, for the presentations of his men’s collections, he often collaborates with dancers such as Momix and Daniel Ezralow. The considered volumes and flowing shapes Miyake conceives are meant to move on, around and with the male body; his silhouettes are never static, because movement – the fifth, temporal dimension of fashion-making, probably the more neglected in the picture-friendly and conceptually static approach that is dominant nowadays – is always part of the creation process.

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Portrait by Brigitte Lacombe. Photos Nadine Szewczyk, Cynthia Hampton, Philippe Brazil and courtesy of Miyake Issey Foundation. Read the full interview by Angelo Flaccavento in the July issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands from June 29th Last Updated: 02 July 2021