ISSEY MIYAKE Brief Timeline (2025)

1971 Tattoo Collection

• inspired by traditional Japanese tattoos created in homage to the dead
• done in memory of music heroes Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, on jersey cloth

1978 Issey Miyake: East Meets West Book

• features an impressive contrast of designs influenced by both Eastern and Western cultures (some of which are of I.Miyake’s)
• was the first ever monograph that was created about the living fashion designer

1980 Plastic Body

• features designs that highlight Miyake’s interest in exploring the relationship between clothing and the body and his experiments with unorthodox materials, including plastic, rattan, and wire

1982 Rattan Body

• featured on the cover of Artforum Magazine with an editorial by Ingrid Sischy and Germano Celant

It marked the first time fashion had been featured on the cover of the art magazine.

1986

• Featured in Time Magazine, International Edition: January 27, as its cover story written by Jay Cocks

1988 ISSEY MIYAKE A-ŪN

1989 Issey Miyake Meets Lucie Rie

1990 TEN SEN MEN

1991 The Loss of Small Detail

• polyester tricot pleats

The pleats in knit fabric not only accommodated the intensity of the dancers’ movements, but their bodies were also transformed by it.

//After a French friend of Miyake’s saw some of the first pleats that the designer had created and suggested that they were perfect for dance, Miyake had William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet Company test them out. Watching them dancing in the costumes, I.Miyake realized that if dancers with such a wide range of body types and heights had so much fun wearing them, ordinary people might too. Later research and development led to the launch, in 1993, of Pleats Please. Over the years, Miyake continued to collaborate with other dancers and choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Danny Ezralow.

1992 ISSEY MIYAKE ’92 TWIST

1992 Olympic Games Uniform For Lithuanian Team

• The team commissioned Miyake to create the design for its official uniform, which consisted of a hooded jacket made with random pleats, T-shirts, silver pants, caps, and shoes.

The collar featured the national flag and name and zipped up to form a hood. A patchwork pattern of the Olympic logo and flag and the name of the team’s country was created in a width great enough to account for contraction during pleating.

1996 Pleats Please Guest Artist Series

//To create the line, he used a patented process called “garment pleating” that involves pleating clothes rather than textiles. The process entails constructing garments at two or three times their intended size, then precisely folding, ironing, and lacing the sewn ensembles, sandwiched between paper, into a heat press. The finished garments are permanently pleated and can be washed and dried without losing shape.

1997 ISAMU NOGUCHI AND ISSEY MIYAKE “ARIZONA”

1997 Universe of Fashion: Issey Miyake Book

//The book begins with extensive insight on Issey Miyake’s perspectives on various aspects of life, such as the commercialization of fashion, the perceptions of space, and the contradictions of the Western world.

It offers a very genuine and candid perspective on Miyake’s upbringing and beliefs, which helps humanize him while still shining a spotlight on his innovative design processes. The biographies are complimented by a series of editorial images that emphasizes the ethos of Issey Miyake.

Every single piece shown in Universe of Fashion all share the same foundational pillars of Issey Miyake: texture, shape, fabric, proportions, and technology.

1998 A-POC

• stands for A Piece of Cloth: creating clothes made out of single pieces of cloth that would envelop the body

2008 XXIc. — XXIst Century Man

2010 132 5. ISSEY MIYAKE

//Issey Miyake and his Reality Lab. team started this project in 2007, with the results of the new production method being launched as a new brand in 2010.

• The brand name refers to the way a piece of cloth (“1D”) takes on a three-dimensional shape (“3D”) and is then folded into a flat surface (“2D”), and the way that wearing it transforms it into a presence that transcends time and dimensions (“5D”).

Working with computer scientists, a variety of 3D shapes are folded, then pressed so that the cuts lie in different positions. This new production method has been used to create shirts, skirts, dresses, pants and more.

The base material is recycled polyester fabric that has undergone a series of improvements in its development, carrying a message for modern-day garment making.

Shiro Kuramata

//During the 1970s, I.Miyake identified Kuramata as an important new talent and asked him to design the Issey Miyake shop in the From–1st Building in Tokyo in 1976.

Kuramata proposed laying garments out on flat surfaces and designed a table made of aluminum honeycomb sheet with a timber surface that cantilevered out of the wall and appeared to be floating with no visible means of support.

Over a decade and a half, Kuramata designed more than 100 interiors for I.Miyake.

Long after Kuramata’s death, I.Miyake maintained the two shops he designed in the Aoyama neighborhood as a silent tribute. “Kuramata was a heroic presence to me, even within a group comprised of so many formidable talents. His use of materials, for example: No matter what it was, he transformed it into an attractive design that we had never seen before. We all deeply respected Kuramata both in terms of his work and as a person. Japanese design is tight and rational and has no unnecessary elements. But Kuramata’s work was filled with mystery, a world that we are not ordinarily capable of expressing. My work might have been different had I never met him.”

Irving Penn

//Designer Issey Miyake and photographer Irving Penn first met in New York City in the 80’s. Eventually Penn flew to Japan to photograph the early days of Miyake’s Design Studio. Penn was able to view the behind the scenes of Miyake’s experimenting with his process of creating the pleats for “Pleats Please!”

Timeline and its references are in the process of completion