Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake (1938–2022) survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing as a seven-year-old and rarely discussed it; instead he built an entire career around the question of how a garment could best mediate between body, motion, and material. After training in graphic design and apprenticing with Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy in Paris, he opened Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo in 1970, presented in New York in 1971, and joined Paris fashion week in 1973. The technological inquiry deepened with the introduction of A-POC ('A Piece of Cloth') in 1998 and Pleats Please in 1993 — both fabric-engineering revolutions that treated clothing as a problem of physics and origami rather than embellishment. BAO BAO ISSEY MIYAKE, the geometric tessellated bag line, followed in 2010. Steve Jobs commissioned Miyake to design his uniform of black turtlenecks. The Miyake Issey Foundation now operates an architecture-grade exhibition space in Tokyo's Roppongi district. Since Miyake's death in 2022 the house has been led by his long-time design team and protégés, and continues to produce work that feels both unmistakably Miyake and unmistakably forward. Few designers built so much intellectual scaffolding around the simple question of what fabric can do.