Obituaries 

Issey Miyake, 1938-2022

Everyday sophistication

Obituaries 

Issey Miyake, 1938-2022

Everyday sophistication

01/09/2022


The young Japanese who landed in Paris in the 1960s to hone his gifts in clothes design could not have imagined himself one day garbing the world’s intelligentsia, from the tight black turtleneck jerseys of Steve Jobs to the voluminous coats of Zaha Hadid. As Fortuny had with the Delphos gown, Issey Miyake revolutionized fashion with his pleats. Instead of pleating the fabric from the start, he worked on the sewn garment, cutting it on the bias, sandwiching it between layers of paper, and feeding it into a heat press. There were sophisticated processes of textile engineering behind his designs, but until his very last breath on 9 August he sewed into them the spirit of the fun and everyday that was a distinction of his admired Noguchi: beautiful, striking, but always comfortable and easy to wash and pack into a suitcase.[+]


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