“Why is Issey Miyake so often singled out as a fashion designer whose work somehow lies above or beyond fashion?” That was the question posed by The New York Times in December 1998. And Miyake himself would have been the first to resist such an elevated proposition. He rejected any suggestion that what he did was art, although it was often so breathtakingly transcendent that it was hard to think of it in any other terms. Instead, in interviews and in the many books and exhibitions devoted to his work, Miyake would insist he was “making things.”
From the moment he launched Miyake Design Studio in 1970, everything started for him with “A Piece of Cloth” (A-POC would much later become the label he gave one of his most futuristic offshoots.) Under the umbrella of such a humble notion, Miyake, who passed away in Tokyo last week at the age of 84, established himself as fashion’s greatest humanist. His clothes were a multifaceted celebration of life: movement, energy, experience and an infectious joy that was rare in fashion. And which applied to Miyake the man, as much as to Miyake the designer.
It’s not so hard to imagine that his love of life stemmed from an unimaginably traumatic childhood experience. Born in Hiroshima, Miyake was seven when he and his sister watched from the hills above the city as it was destroyed by an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. That terrible moment, literally fusing past, present and future, birthed an uncertain new world, and a new global consciousness. Miyake would become an enthusiastic citizen of that world, pioneering hybrid new forms, endless new ways of “making things.”
Stay tuned to BoF for Tim Blanks’ full reflections on the life and work of Issey Miyake.
