All of Issey Miyake's work starts from a concept: absence. She so much she made clothes from a single piece of cloth, without a stitch, as sculptural lamps of shadows. It may be that this search for purity arose from his fight against terror: at the age of seven, from the windows of his classroom in his native Hiroshima, he saw the sky burn. His mother died three years later from the effects of radiation. At the end of the 1960s, he traveled to Paris and New York, where he worked for Givenchy couture – his mark can be seen in the reinvented turtleneck worn by Steve Jobs – but then, in 1970, he opened his own studio in Tokyo.
In 1973, a sashiko signed by him, with a raw silk stitch, appeared on the cover of Elle magazine. His name rose in the Olympus of fashion. A spiritual sensation of immense lightness was felt in his Parisian parades and marked a new elegance. In the 90s, Issey Miyake lived his maximum splendor and that Japanese wave –along with Yamamoto and Comme des garçons- managed to make the silhouettes flow by freeing them from the rules of Western pattern design.
He stated that designing was a living organism that seeks comfort and well-being. He did not resort to the word beauty. He brought Japanese guitars to his parades, botany, haikus. In 1998 she invented the famous baked pleats, her famous please peats in vibrant colors, worn by women like Zaha Hadid or Carmen Alborch. She worked with artists: she asked Makiko Minagawa for a kind of tattoo to stamp with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix – who died the same year she debuted – and with Yayoi Kusama, who would explode with polka dots please.
He worked with rudimentary materials: whasi, jute, horsehair, batik, wiring, rattan. He created a plastic corset for Grace Jones. He achieved textile origami and polyester pleats. Although his minimalist aspirations reached a peak with his project A_POC, "a single piece of cloth": clothes cut from a single tube of fabric and ready to wear, which today became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The creator was a pioneer in transmitting the idea of diversity. His suits were meant for all bodies, all races. So much so that already in the seventies he asked the leader of women's suffrage in Japan, Fusae Ichikawa, who was eighty years old, to be photographed with her clothes – “I prefer to say fashionable clothes”, Miyake repeated.
“All my work stems from the simplest ideas that go back to the oldest civilizations” he told the New York Times in 2004 in an email interview. The secretary warned the journalist that her boss, instead of wasting time chatting, preferred to "keep doing things." “Issey Miyake Making Things”, that was the title of her first exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, in 1998,-was her way of defining herself. He retired to think a year later, but he was still in charge of his textile inventions, of his recycled origami. She wrote that the key phrases in his work were: "make people think, make things, make things come true."
I tried to get an interview with him in vain, for years, even last June I told Sonsoles Blanco, head of Miyake perfumes in Spain, my idea of writing a letter. I had met him at the end of the eighties: it is a vague memory but I managed to see his frank smile and his elusive walk, I was very close to the skirts of Pepa Domingo – his store in Lleida was a beacon and also a kind of NGO of the first fashion From author-. So I had the good fortune to accompany her to Paris a couple of times and to be able to greet her creator. We all wanted a softly pleated Miyake because it reached unusual shapes and volumes; Pepa still remembers that the clothes were nice but they sold little.
Some of her garments unfold creating a three-dimensional effect, suitable for all bodies and not the other way around. He was able to distill the essence of clothing and make it light. His perfumes evoke the raindrop. His work is an invitation to walk on the sunny side of life.
