Issey Miyake

At 86 years old, Issey Miyake has this physical status:

Life and career

Miyake was born in Hiroshima on April 22, 1938. Miyake Kazunaru, Miyake Kazunaru) was born. In August 1945, he was still living there seven years later when the US military dropped an atomic bomb there. He first announced this in 2009, when Barack Obama called for global nuclear disarmament.

He aspired to be a dancer as an infant. He got his interest in fashion by investigating his sister's fashion magazines. He studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964. At the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, he entered designs into a fashion competition. However, he did not win a competition due to his inability of pattern-making or sewing skills. He enrolled in the Chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne academy in Paris and was apprenticed to Guy Laroche as assistant designer after graduation. He also drew 50 to 100 sketches a day for Hubert de Givenchy, drawing 50 to 100 sketches every day.

He migrated to New York City in 1969, where he met artists such as Christo and Robert Rauschenberg. He was enrolled in English classes at Columbia University and spent time on Seventh Avenue for designer Geoffrey Beene. He founded the Miyake Design Studio, a high-end female fashion designer, after returning to Tokyo in 1970.

Miyake admired artist Isamu Nomurchi, whose novelty and sense of fun in his designs inspired Miyake from a young age. He was also inspired by fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet's use of geometric measurements and "a single piece of stunning cloth." He visited several museums in Paris and said that sculptures such as Constantin Brâncuși and Alberto Giacometti inspired him.

Miyake is credited by San Francisco Chronicle fashion editor Sylvia Rubin with "reinventing" the Mariano Fortuny pleat in the 1980s, alongside Babette Pinsky.

He began to experiment with new pleating techniques that would encourage both mobility for the wearer and ease of care and production. The garments are first cut and sewn, then sandwiched between layers of paper and introduced into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric's'memory' holds the pleats, and when the garments are freed from their paper cocoons, they are ready to wear. In a piece entitled "The Loss of Small Detail" by William Forsythe and later work on ballet "Garden in the setting," he made the costumes for Ballett Frankfurt with an ultra feather-polyester jersey permanently pleated. Miyake discovered that the latest technique of making clothes fit well in dancers. After investigating how dancers move, he sent 200 to 300 dresses for dancers to wear a different one in every performance of The Last Detail. This led to the creation of the Pleats, Please range, as well as the encouragement of dancers to perform his art.

He had a long association with Austrian-born pottery artist Dame Lucie Rie. She gifted him with her archival ceramic buttons, which he incorporated into his designs.

Steve Jobs, Apple's Steve Jobs, became a friend of his company after seeing the uniforms Miyake created for Sony's factory employees. Miyake created similar vests for Apple employees at Jobs' request, but Jobs' resistance to the idea of a uniform sparked. Despite this, Miyake went on to produce the black turtlenecks, which would become part of Jobs' signature clothing. "I begged Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I loved, and he made me look like a hundred of them," Jobs said.

In an interview with poet/artist Steven Vita of Veery Journal, 1991, legendary designer Geoffrey Beene said he admired Issey Miyake for Miyake's art.

"Design is not about philosophy; it's for life," he said in the International Herald Tribune in March 1992.

Miyake worked with artists on his Artist Gallery show between 1996 and 1999. Yasuma Morimura, a photographer and collage maker, was involved in the first collaboration; the other artists were Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson, and Cai Guo-Qiang. Miyake said that his intention was not to answer the question "Is fashion art?" Rather than create a "interactive link" between the art and the people who adored it, the aim was to establish a "interactive relationship" between the artist and the people who admired it. The wearers interacted with fashion and art simultaneously by wearing the artworks on their bodies.

Miyake turned over the men's and women's collections respectively to his associate, Naoki Takizawa, so he could return to research full time. In 2007, Naoki Takizawa founded his own brand with the support of the Issey Miyake Group and was appointed as Creative Director by Dai Fujiwara, who served as the House of Issey Miyake from 2009 to 2012. As of the Spring/Summer 2012 collections, the design jobs were split, with Yoshiyuki Miyamae as the head designer of the women's collection and Yusuke Takahashi designing the men's line.

He was one of the co-directors of 21 21 DESIGN SIGHT, Japan's first design museum, as of 2012. The biggest retrospective of his art at The National Art Center in Tokyo began in March 2016 and commemorating 45 years of work.

Miyake died of liver cancer at the age of 84 on August 5th, 2022.

Source

Awards

• In 2005, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture
• Miyake won the Arts and Philosophy Kyoto Prize in 2006
• Japan's Order of Culture, 2010
• XXIII Premio Compasso d'Oro ADI, 2014, for family of lamps IN-EI Issey Miyake, Artemide