Leading art-book publisher Taschen’s next big release is nearing—and the subject is the late Japanese fashion giant Issey Miyake, a boundary-breaking pioneer. Breathtaking in scope, undertaking, and size, Issey Miyake limns the collective work of a designer and undisputed icon in the fashion industry spanning 1960 to 2022, before his passing at age 84.
A collaborative effort by editor Midori Kitamura, chairman of the Miyake Design Studio, The Miyake Issey Foundation, and president of 21_21 Design Sight, and Kazuko Koike, who wrote and edited the earlier Issey Miyake: East Meets West, the fusion of great art, technology, style, poetry, and philosophy collates in this collector’s edition.
Miyake’s work has been painstakingly and precisely featured, photographed, scrutinised, and archived for posterity. In this mighty tome, the words echolocate among fashion purveyors and scribes, archivists and haute-couture historians as the comprehensive chronology of Miyake’s work, profile, ambition, and inspiration, from tender youth to resolute veteran, is beautifully captured. While the striking images of Issey Miyake may be the grand appeal, the big takeaway is the reflective, introspective process that subsumed the designer and helped capture the zeitgeist; take note of how often he led and declined to follow the movement.
Miyake captivated a global audience for decades. Pouring over the pages, many familiar images stem back to him. Remember Steve Jobs’s signature look? In his final staged appearances, he only wore Miyake, and the enduring iconography of black turtlenecks over denim lives on. But Jobs wasn’t the only one who adhered to the work of the Japanese legend. Celebrities of all stripes wore, and still wear, Miyake’s signature pieces, signalling a tacit approval of his novel twists, flawless textile and print, and colour that are leaps of faith and fabric. Meryl Streep is a fan, as is iconoclast Grace Jones. Jones in fact, walked the catwalk for Miyake several times in the 1970s and 1980s, and wore his clothes in her personal life as well. Kim Kardashian wears his pieces, as does Beyoncé. If you spot voluminous yarn of fabric seemingly defying gravity and physics, it’s probably a Miyake. His fan club is as diverse as can be, like the mind-boggling portfolio of the visionary.
His work was a unique fusion of practicality that allowed the draped to function in fashion, but the ensemble had the novelty of technology, and his boundary-breaking creativity that eschewed the norm. In due course, a reader will recognise that so much of his work roots back to his study of graphic design at Tama Art Studio, his apprenticeship at Guy Laroche, his prolific sketch-work under the watchful eye of Hubert de Givenchy—and the irony of his failed designs at the annual fashion competition at the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, where he was later deemed a master of the fashion movement in due course.
Taschen’s Issey Miyake (HK$900) is now on sale.
All images courtesy of Taschen.
