The following is an excerpt from Issey Miyake, a new book from Taschen on the life and work of the late renowned clothing designer. Here, Kazuko Koike, the author of the essay in the book, as well as the author of books including Japan Design, recalls how Miyake developed the pleated clothes that became Pleats Please, why they were “epoch-making,” and Miyake’s first principle: mono zukuri, or making things. It has been lightly edited for clarity and length.”
It was a scarf that triggered it all.
[Textile director for Issey Miyake Studio] Makiko Minagawa was looking for “a paper-light and quick-to-dry material,” and she tentatively folded a piece of polyester and pleated it. By chance, Issey happened to notice.
Miyake himself looks back and says, “By folding a square piece of fabric into quarters and then pleating these diagonally, a variety of clothing was born thanks to this new technique.” Yet the bud, which would eventually become Pleats Please Issey Myake (hereafter Pleats Please), itself was born as a result of Miyake’s steadfast pursuit of materials development and imagination.
I still remember a 1988 phone call clearly; he was busy preparing the 1989 Spring-Summer Collection. “You know a bread-baking oven? Just like that, a blouse is baked. Like a loaf of bread!” This was the announcement of a pleated shirt, a product with an intrinsic 3D shape. Miyake had long been eager to come up with “simple, ordinary clothes” for everyday life. And the new technique and polyester material were to fulfill just these conditions. Thus, Miyake Design Studio’s research and trials leading up to production kicked off.
‘Far from so-called ‘fashion”: The launch of Pleats Please
The prototypes of Pleats Please were first brought to people’s attention in Amsterdam at the Stedelijk Museum. Conceived and organized around the theme of the power of creation, the exhibition Energieën had invited artists, architects, designers, and others from around the world, including Anselm Kiefer, Ettore Sottsass, and many others.
Issey covered the museum’s white floor with a surface which had cut-out bumps of a few millimeters in depth. Large pleated clothes were displayed flat on the surface. While there were some clothed and standing mannequins, the scene was far from so-called “fashion.” Many visitors wondered, “What is this?”—a reaction to his presentation that surely pleased Miyake. “Can I wear this?” “Do I dig it?” Questions of this type, which seem to infer a wearer’s preconceptions concerning clothes, gradually disappeared from the minds of the museum visitors.
The aesthetic origins of pleats can be found in antiquity, for example in the statues of sibyls in Delphi, and at the beginning of the 20th century, in the work made by Mariano Fortuny in Venice, including costumes featuring pleats. Both are considered important work in the history of clothing.
Miyake, however, was by then committed to creating pleated clothing for our contemporary times. He was also intrigued by the various features pleats embodied when using textiles devised not only in the West but in all parts of the world. At the time, he also enjoyed the lights and shadows that emanate throughout Nature in such elements as the desert and the ocean.
Paul Klee points out that the “movements” of lines make a plane. Thus, moving one line horizontally and another vertically, and following through their correlations, could be regarded as a series of endless pleats.
Also, the force that brings together and compresses pleats incorporates within it an element of play. Issey Miyake applied the plastic principle that brings a thread to a line, and a line to a plane, to the polyester material, and gave this method the opportunity to prevail in today’s clothing.
A new approach to producing everyday clothing
What was epoch-making is that, predetermining the form of the clothes when worn on a body, the whole cloth is sewn and then put into a machine that gives the fabric its final feature, that is, its pleats. Conventionally, cutting and sewing fabric with its finished texture has been the standard approach, but Pleats Please clothes are made completely differently.
Pleats Please was launched in 1993 and quickly became a hit product around the world. Further research into pleats is ongoing, including studying techniques of transforming tissues by heating, and exploring the possibility of making products mixed with cotton, wool, and other materials.
The success of Pleats Please in the global market, not as fashion items but as material products, had been preceded by a journey of 20 or so years by the Miyake Design Studio (including, of course, Makiko Minagawa)—an amazing journey of trial and research efforts.
Moved by Miyake Design Studio’s dedicated involvement, professionals of greatly varied specializations—people involved in the selection of the best polyester materials, in thread development, in the development of a technology to suppress static phenomena, in the study of knit materials—joined in the pursuit, and fully cooperated and contributed to the work of the Miyake Design Studio.
Mono zukuri – Making Things: The First Principle
Mono wo tsukuru toiu koto (On Making Things). This was the name Issey Miyake gave to a [1999] exhibition, and, as I think of it, I wonder if he might at the time have been haunted by a certain world in his mind that he wished to bid farewell to completely.
Like the calendar repeating itself year after year, so the fashion business continues to repeat past conventions, and both the industry and the media place their priority on marketing.
Negative factors such as these, as well as established preconceptions and customs, surround the environment and together they discourage any serious mono zukuri.
Miyake even says laughingly at times, “My favorite word is kusabi, wedge.”
I sometimes wonder what goes on in the deep reality of our time—and his time—in which he maintains a youthful sensibility; this tense, dense time. What converges upon and imbues Issey’s idea of mono zukuri are nothing but confidence and pride regarding the past and the future:
“Making things” allows you to have the same state of mind as ordinary people. When I speak of “ordinary people,” I mean our contemporaries, the people who are living in our era, at the same time. Making clothes that everyone can wear means making clothes for people who live with us, our contemporaries.”
The exhibition Issey Miyake Making Things was presented in Paris and New York, and in both cities the sites were filled with joy. Pleats pieces were hung in vast spaces with high ceilings. The installation was entitled Jumping, and that’s exactly what one felt the clothes were doing. It was realized by Tokujin Yoshioka, a space designer who had inherited the best of genes from Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake.
Fundamentally, the show’s organizers hoped and intended that the exhibition would make visitors feel good as they left the venue, and observing their reactions as they did so confirmed that the show had succeeded. How many of them would recall, years later when they grew up, what they had seen on that day? If Issey Miyake entrusted anything to the exhibition as an art medium, I suspect that it might have been the expectation that this sort of recollection would prevail.