Issey Miyake Sport Eau de Toilette for Him - 100 ml

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Models display creations from Issey Miyake’s spring/summer 2023 men’s collection during Paris fashion week in June. Photograph: Mohammed Badra/EPA

Loth to give interviews, Miyake had a pronounced limp – a result of surviving the 1945 atomic bomb dropped on his home town of Hiroshima when he was seven. Three years later, his mother died of radiation exposure. A-PoC Le Feu, by Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, 1999, an example of Miyake’s A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth) concept – extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments. Photograph: Yasuaki Yoshinaga/A-PoC Le Feu, Issey Miyake Miyake went on to New York in 1969 as an assistant for Geoffrey Beene, to learn about mass production. But in 1970, another bout of radiation-related disease returned him to Tokyo for treatment, where friends loaned him the money to start Miyake Design Studio. In his remarkable first show in Tokyo, a model stripped off many layers until nude, a scandal that alarmed his sponsors and made clear his originality.Above all, he had unusual respect for materials derived from fossil fuels, seeing plastic, nylon and all the polys not as cheap disposable substitutes for natural substances, but as themselves having unique properties – polyfibres he developed with adventurous manufacturers were machine-washable, uncrushable, stretchy and kind to skin. Hi-tech production processes reduced yarn as well as fabric waste; his garments were visually timeless and made to last physically. Miyake never thought of hydrocarbons as infinite resources to burn. Their complex chemistry and potential uses were precious – the heat of long-gone suns made clothes and ingredients for his water-themed perfumes, starting with L’Eau d’Issey in 1992. In the 21st century, his Tokyo Reality Lab recycled plastic bottle tops into durable, wearable cloth. I am most interested in people and the human form,” Miyake told the New York Times in 2014. “Clothing is the closest thing to all humans.” Much like Andy Warhol, Miyake was interested in the overlap between art and design, and fashion. Throughout his 52-year career, the designer maintained an “anti-trend” stance, always referring to his designs as “clothing” rather than “fashion”.

In 1973, he began to show in Paris, distinctively different from other Japanese designers arriving there. His regular collections of sculptured, high-end clothes were spectacular, but the real fun came with a change of focus to volume production ready-to-wear lines through the 1990s. They brought him nearer his ideal, unfashiony customers. A star-like creation for Issey Miyake during the 1999-2000 autumn-winter ready-to-wear collections. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/EPA

Mikyake saw technology as a solution to the problem of overproduction, with one such solution the late 90’s “One Piece of Cloth” idea (later known as A-POC) which pioneered the idea of making clothes out of a single tube of fabric, cutting down and waste and showing exactly what could be done with a knitting machine, a computer and the right knowhow. In a rare 2009 op-ed for the New York Times, Miyake recounted just how much that day, and his mother’s subsequent death, informed his creativity. “I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic. Despite the end of Men, Issey Miyake Inc. will continue to produce the wildly popular HOMME PLISSÉ Issey Miyake menswear collection and various womenswear imprints, including mainline Miyake, PLEATS PLEASE and Haat . Miyake Inc. has not confirmed any changes in production for of the brands that it oversees, like tac:tac.

There was nowhere to study couture, so, once Japan permitted travel abroad on a tiny budget, he went to Paris in 1965 for a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and interned for Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. The important Parisian education, though, was the student protests of 1968, revolting against the haute-bourgeoisie, usual customers for couture. Miyake sided with the students, wanting to make clothes, both wilder and more useful, for ordinary people, unconstrained by age, size, gender or fit.Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo. But piqued by the crossover between disciplines, he pivoted to fashion and moved to Paris to become an apprentice to Guy Laroche and eventually work for Hubert de Givenchy around the time Audrey Hepburn was wearing his dresses.