Issey Miyake

A Graphic Designer's Route Into Fashion

Miyake did not train as a fashion designer. He studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo from 1959 to 1964, a five-year course in visual composition — how shapes, surfaces and structures are arranged so that they communicate. Coming to clothing from graphic design rather than from dressmaking changes the starting questions. A dressmaker begins with the body and the garment types that clothe it; a graphic designer begins with form, pattern and system, and treats the garment as an object to be composed. That difference in formation is the background against which his later reputation for treating clothes as designed objects, built from fabric behaviour and structure, is usually read, and the bare fact of the degree explains why his formation is so often mentioned alongside his work. His early life carries a second formative fact: born in Hiroshima, he suffered from osteomyelitis at the age of 10, a bone disease, and it recurred in his adulthood. A childhood illness of that seriousness, returning later, is part of the biography rather than the design record, but it marks a life in which the body and its fragility were experienced facts long before clothing the body became his profession.

Paris, Then New York, Then His Own Studio

His apprenticeship followed the classic mid-century route for an ambitious young designer, in two countries. After graduation he worked in Paris for Guy Laroche and for Givenchy until 1968, which placed him inside French couture houses at the end of the period when Paris set the terms of fashion. He then crossed to the other centre, working for Geoffrey Beene in New York City in 1969 — an American designer known for a very different, American approach to clothes. Two years after the Beene post, in 1971, he founded both the Miyake Design Studio and Issey Miyake Inc. Founding a design studio and a company together, rather than simply launching a label, sets up two things at once: a place where design is developed, and a business that owns and sells it. The pattern is the reverse of the older couture model, in which a designer opened a salon and the business grew around the salon. Here the structure was corporate and design-led from the start, which suits a designer whose training was in a design discipline rather than in a workroom trade.

Seven Collections Under One Name

The scale of what followed is best seen in the flagship store. His United States flagship, in Tribeca, New York, carries all seven of his collections: Issey Miyake Women's, Issey Miyake Mens, Fete, Pleats Please, APOC, Issey Miyake Me and HaaT. A single designer name carrying seven distinct collections is a portfolio, not a single line — women's and men's clothing under the main name, plus separately named ranges, each with its own identity. Several of the names describe an idea rather than a wearer: Pleats Please names a fabric treatment, and APOC is an acronym-style name for a concept line, which fits a founder trained to think in systems and named concepts. Two further choices reinforce the design-first character of the enterprise. The flagship was designed by architect Frank Gehry, so the building that presents the clothes was itself commissioned from a leading designer in another field, and its location in Tribeca puts the store in a New York district associated with art and architecture rather than with the traditional luxury shopping streets. His description as an international Japanese fashion designer is earned by that geography: trained in Tokyo, employed in Paris and New York, and selling through a flagship in New York that gathers the whole of his output in one place.