Issey Miyake is a Japanese fashion brand with a flagship store in Midtown Manhattan. The studio experiments with material invention and computer-programmed production to create garments that move with the body rather than constrain it.
Issey Miyake started from the thread: literally. At Miyake Design Studio, founded in Tokyo in 1970, the process begins not with sketches but with material invention: a single thread fed into a computer-programmed loom, or oversized polyester garments sandwiched between paper and pressed into permanent pleats. The question the work keeps asking is how a piece of cloth can get out of the wearer's way: become light enough, resilient enough, shapeless enough flat and sculptural enough worn, to dissolve the boundary between object and body. That pursuit ran from the heat-pressed polyester of PLEATS PLEASE through A-POC's zero-waste tube of knit, and into the Reality Lab's origami-derived 132 5. collection, where a dress folds into a star and unfolds around you. 'Design is not for philosophy,' Miyake said, 'but for life.'
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