Issey Miyake

ISSEY MIYAKE


I observe that Iseey Miyake the Japanese fashion designer desires not so much to transgress boundaries in his clothing design as to maintain them as transparent walls.

An Issey Miyake design is neither wholly Eastern nor Western; his garments seem to simultaneously inhabit different temporal and geographic spaces. A piece (for Miyake’s clothing begs one to refer to them as art pieces) may look futuristic, but it is also rooted in the ancient feudal tradition of Japan’s samurai warriors.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was seven years old in August 1945, when his mother, suffered serious burns during U.S atomic bombing, lived another four years after the attack. The American occupation of Japan gave Miyake a first-hand view of what the west had to offer – Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, TV, Frozen Diners – and is surely a source of Miyake’s East-meets-West aesthetic.

In 1959 Miyake enrolled as a graphic arts student at Tokyo’s prestigious Tama Art...