Couturier of atomic talent – Newspaper Kommersant No. 144 (7345) of 08/10/2022

On Tuesday, employees of the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo told Agence France-Presse that the founder of the brand, the great Japanese designer Issei Miyaki, died on the evening of August 5 at the age of 85. The funeral has already taken place, and only the closest ones were present. Japan, where he was born, and France, where he became famous, say goodbye to the “flying couturier”.

Issei Miyaki was born in 1938, in the pre-war world. But all his biographies begin on August 6, 1945. He was seven years old when the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on his hometown of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. The child survived, but was ill all his life, the mother died three years later from terrible burns. Issei Miyaki for a long time refused to talk about what he had experienced. Only a few years ago he said: “I saw something that no one should see.”

Could a person who “saw this” make art, at least something similar to what was created by the generations of his parents. Or wear European costumes, like “Japs” from mocking cartoons. He came up with a completely different fashion – on the verge of sculpture and high technology, the fashion of the new atomic age. After graduating from Tokyo’s Tama Academy of Art, he continued his studies in Paris, alternating between studies and practice at the Givenchy and Guy Laroche fashion houses, and then returned to his homeland in the 1970s to start his own brand.

Issei Miyaki very quickly found his way – not as a “tailor”, but as a technologist, inventor, creating the most recognizable “great style” in the world fashion of the 20th century.

Miyaki did not think in terms of individual works, costumes, dresses, not so much in separate collections, but in unified concepts of a sculptural body case. Such as in the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) collection, where clothes were born from a single piece of fabric, or in the 132.5 collection, where costumes were origami variants.

He conquered the world with weightless pleated and pleated dresses, skirts and jackets, fantasy versions of the old pleated pleats. Miyaki created Pleats Please in 1993 for William Forsyth and his dancers at the Frankfurt Ballet Theatre. Since then, his pleats have been worn everywhere, marveling at their lightness and convenience. For their amazing airiness, Miyaki was nicknamed the “flying couturier”. Not entirely true, since the message for Pleats Please was not “couture”, but the simplification and democratization of fashion, the creation of a beautiful women’s dress, but, according to the fashion designer, as easy to use, “like jeans or T-shirts.”

There was no need for details, accessories, embroidery, weaving, patterns – everything that old Parisian fashion houses are so proud of. They were smartly twisted and completed single pieces of fabric. The revolutionary radicalism of European modernism was combined with immersion in the tradition of Japanese folk art – in the geometry of origami or in the architecture of samurai armor.

Miyaki preferred to be called not a tailor or even a fashion designer, but a “clothing manufacturer”.

To create his living sculptures, he preferred scissors to needles. Luxurious fabrics gave way to specially produced materials, including plastic, wire, synthetics, that hold their shape and do not need body support.

Several brands were created around his name, he “manufactured clothes” not only for women, but also for men, freeing them from annoying twos and threes. No wonder his friend was the creator of another “big style” of the era – one of the founders of Apple, Steve Jobs, who was happy to wear Japanese turtlenecks with a high neck.

By the end of the 1990s, Issei Miyaki stepped away from the direct management of his brands, but his successors retained the spirit of technical innovation associated with artistic innovation.

The artist died in August, just one day short of the 77th anniversary of the first atomic bombing. No one will say whether the dose of radiation he received in Hiroshima is to blame for the liver cancer that killed him. But it always seemed to me that his costumes had a super-task from a military childhood – to create a shell that could not touch the burned body.

Alexey Tarkhanov, Paris