“Beauty is like a sunset; it goes as soon as you try to capture it. The beauty you like is precisely that which escapes you” a very well-known quote by Japanese fashion heretic Issey Miyake, which signifies his balance of practical and poetic wisdom, sadly passed away on August 5th in Tokyo encircled by family and friends. Reports say the cause of death was hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of liver cancer. He was 84 years of age and as per the designer's wish there was no memorial service or funeral meeting but the world has come together on digital platforms to pay tribute to the legend.
He was known for his cutting-edge fashion technologies and iconic award-winning perfume L’Eau d’Issey which won innumerable prizes including a Fragrance Foundation FiFi for best women’s introductions Europe in 1993. Miyake collaborated frequently with various talents coming from different spectrums of life for nearly six decades. He kept on reinventing the realism of functional and aesthetic contexts through his creative techniques.
Born in Hiroshima and witnessing the 1945 atomic bomb blast at the age of 7, he was always inclined to work in search of aesthetic harmony through creative formate which is modern and optimistic. Miyake developed several lines of clothing in his early working life, including pleats please and A-POC. He was known for designing Steve Job's
signature black turtleneck and his iconic pleated trousers were the favourite of many known artists. He started with trying out the Fortuny pleat, which would permit for flexibility of action while signalling all the cachet of high-end design. The fabric’s mastery to hold its pleats made it immaculate for dancers, he used to send nearly 300 pieces to the Ballett Frankfurt, which led to the evolution of his pleats please range in 1999.
It would be ten years until Miyake launched a menswear equivalent Homme Plisse, which United performers, gallerists, musicians, and fashion heads in elasticated waists, comfort, and craft. The procedure to make these “seihin pleats” can now be detected at the Homme Plissè flagship in Minami-Aoyama in Japan. Which opened in July 2019. Young designers from Japan today, learning and following his concepts and engineering of fabrics and garments. They honoured him with the title called ‘prince of pleats’ due to his innovative mind for buoyant pattern making. He was an apprentice to Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy in his young days when he used to draw 50 to 100 sketches daily for the fashion houses and eventually returned to Tokyo in 1970 to establish the Miyake Design Studio. He retired from fashion in 1997, yet continued to supervise the creative direction of his companies such as Issey Miyake, Issey Miyake Fête, Pleats Please and his accessories offshoot Bao Bao. While his signature perfume has won many women’s hearts for decades. Like he said ‘ the best fragrance is the scent of water, the fragrance of dew and rain falling on plants. Water is the essential element, a source of life and energy. A perfume that, like a garment, moves to suit the woman, her skin. A perfume that embraces a woman.’ he was a true poet who turned his poetic vision into a real product.
Issey Miyake was a creator with a real vision as far as his techniques are concerned. A designer, perfumer, and visionary who dressed many and left his legacy with his signature on fashion dreams. Issey was a sacred treasure to everyone who worked with him and used his creativity in terms of redefining the relationship between body and
garment. Like he said “Design is not for philosophy it's for life”.
