“Why, clothes are more important than art.”
Can clothes be art, and can artworks be fashion items? When considering art and fashion, it can be challenging to define where each field begins and ends; include design in this consideration, and the boundaries get even blurrier. The work of Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake challenges us to look at the intersections, rather than the boundaries, between art, fashion, and design. Employing technology-driven processes from raw materials to such final products as ready-to-wear clothing, his pieces fold together concepts from multiple disciplines to reinvent modern dressing.
As a 25-year old student at Tama Art University, Miyake argued for fashion’s role in connecting various design disciplines. At the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, he wrote a letter expressing dissatisfaction with the omission of fashion from the proceedings, and went on to stage a fashion show titled A Poem of Cloth and Stone that made an argument for the rich contribution of fashion photography to visual culture. In this debut clothing collection, photography was given a crucial role. Producing complementary photos that used strategic lighting to highlight the contrast between the clothes and the runway background, the designer used photography to emphasize colors and shapes that pointed at the formal creative value of fashion pieces, i.e., the original concepts they embodied. To him, that differentiated them from street trends, which would in turn borrow these concepts and creatively adapt them to mass consumption.
This ambition to create original concepts for timeless designs inspired Miyake to investigate one of the oldest items of Japanese clothing, the kimono. The simplicity of the kimono, composed of eight pieces sewn in straight lines, is carried on in Miyake’s study of the textile from which they are made. In his 1990s collection A Piece of Clothing (APOC), presented in Paris and New York, clothes were made out of a single piece of fabric that enveloped the entire body. The clothes were produced as machine-made rolls of fabric with patterns, which the consumer would cut to create customized garments. Taking the garment as the fundamental unit of fashion design, Miyake said, “I learned about the space between the body and the fabric from the traditional kimono…not the style, but the space.”
Issey Miyake’s work in fashion spans over 50 years, and contemporary Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo have acknowledged its lasting impact on the Japanese design landscape. Miyake noted that Japan is a country which “does not just follow Europe in a servile way but produces its own forms.” Although key concepts in his work referred to Japanese aesthetics, its international influence spoke to his embrace of universally appealing concepts: freedom of movement, beauty, and practicality.
The 1993 collection Pleats Please Issey Miyake was born out of Miyake’s research into how industrial production affected traditional Japanese fabrics. Until then, clothes were cut and sewn from previously pleated material. Miyake assembled oversized garments which were folded, ironed, oversewn, precisely pleated with entwined layers of paper, and, finally, heat-pressed. The paper was discarded and the pleats were left permanently in the pieces, even after washing. The advantages of this technique—making his pieces lightweight and shape-retaining—were demonstrated in another interdisciplinary effort. While his debut show A Poem of Cloth and Stone incorporated photography as a key element of fashion design, in Pleats Please he integrated dance into the design process, creating costumes for American dancer and choreographer William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet in 1988. Miyake launched the ready-to-wear version of the playful collection in 1993, and saw it as a practical choice for women: “I have always said that clothes owe their existence as much to the people who wear them as to the people who make them. I would say that Pleats Please Issey Miyake is a comprehensive response to the evolution of the condition of women.”
Miyake’s reinvigoration of Japanese traditions through research into innovative methods of production included the development of an industrial method for making shijiraori, an artisanal quilted Japanese fabric. This was also the case in his Tattoo collection, which reproduced Japanese funeral tattoos on jersey fabric. The cultural exchanges Miyake presented in clothes—engaging traditional Japanese concepts to produce globally appealing pieces—were displayed in the show and the accompanying book East Meets West in 1979. Miyake was working at the height of the Cold War and carrying personal memories of the bombing of Hiroshima, where he grew up. Miyake’s breach of cultural boundaries was reasserted in a 2009 article for the New York Times, in which he reflected on the threat of atomic weapons and the state of global conflicts and offered support for former president Barack Obama’s pledge to create a nuclear-free world.
Issey Miyake’s garments, and the interdisciplinary ideas they reflected, resonated with practitioners across art and design. The launch of East Meets West, for instance, was attended by sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whose role as an inspiration to Miyake was also mentioned in the designer’s New York Times article. In 1977, as a jury member for the Mainichi Design Awards, architect Arata Isozaki spoke about the pioneering inclusion of fashion in the world of design. Acknowledgments like this one highlighted Miyake’s own view of the design process: “I don’t think making clothes can be a static thing, and though I use established techniques, I try to take them in new directions. My aim is to use these techniques and to improve upon them.”
Larissa Guimaraes, independent scholar, 2025
Note: Opening quote is from Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (London: Berg, 2011), 23.
