Next month Miyake’s designs will be featured in an exhibition at the Costume Institute in New York, Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology. The museum’s curator, Andrew Bolton, was in Tokyo for the opening of Miyake’s exhibition. The pieces he will be exhibiting in New York include his SS94 flying-saucer dress and the 1999 A-POC. “Miyake’s clothes have an aura about them,” Bolton says. The A-POC in particular is the perfect fusion of computer technology and basic knitting machine. With his textile engineer at the time, Dai Fujiwara, Miyake worked out a way to create clothing that is knitted from a single strand of thread without the need for additional sewing or cutting. It is an industrialised process that eliminates the final cutting and sewing. But the secret of Miyake’s success (his business is still privately owned, with 133 stores in Japan and 91 internationally, plus eight lines of clothing and bags, as well as fragrances, lights and watches) is not that he has embraced technology, more that he has managed to use it in a way that fuses the innovative – the industrial and the digital – with the most elemental of crafts. In 2007 he launched his Reality Lab. “It’s quite amazing to see Japanese technology,” he says. “We develop many different things, but happily I have a great team of designers. I am going to let them get on with it, and this way I can be free to explore.” There was nowhere to study couture, so, once Japan permitted travel abroad on a tiny budget, he went to Paris in 1965 for a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and interned for Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. The important Parisian education, though, was the student protests of 1968, revolting against the haute-bourgeoisie, usual customers for couture. Miyake sided with the students, wanting to make clothes, both wilder and more useful, for ordinary people, unconstrained by age, size, gender or fit. Make me a fabric that looks like poison.’ This is what Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake apparently once instructed his textile engineer, Makiko Minagawa. Miyake’s idea of fashion was often beautiful and always technically challenging. Over a career spanning four decades, his work would demonstrate an extraordinarily virtuosic range, from red plastic moulded bustiers with flirtatiously flared peplums to colour faded menswear drawing on shibori, a traditional Japanese tie-dye technique. He designed multicoloured flying saucer dresses that could be compressed like paper lanterns to fit into a suitcase and tubular industrial knits that the wearer could cut to size along a dotted line. Most importantly, perhaps, Miyake pioneered an innovative method of heat-pressed pleating that would become his distinctive fashion signature. His clothes were joyful and the news of his death, aged 84, marks the loss of a great twentieth-century fashion visionary.

Hat stand: a ‘body’ made from rattan and bamboo using traditional techniques for the shows in 1981. Photograph: Masaya Yoshimura There are superficial similarities between Noguchi’s iconic lanterns and Miyake’s IN-EI lights, but Miyake’s work – created applying the same mathematical theories of 3D design as in his 132 5. collection – has a significantly different structure.

The Tokyo exhibit will include large-scale projections of Penn’s collection photographs, an animated film by Pascal Roulin with original drawings by Michael Crawford, Issey Miyake collection posters being exhibited as a group for the first time, and original fine-art prints made by Penn, along with his preliminary drawings for photographing Miyake’s designs. Issey Miyake, designer, artist and maker of clothes, died from liver cancer on 5 August 2022, aged 84. His remarkable career was defined by collaborations across the arts and the constant experimentation of his Miyake Design Studio, with material and manufacture, both traditional and futuristic; form, of ever-surprising silhouette; and colour, always lighting up the room. But this was always the means to an end, in service of the dedicated exploration of clothing and the body that underpinned everything Miyake did. In 1973, he began to show in Paris, distinctively different from other Japanese designers arriving there. His regular collections of sculptured, high-end clothes were spectacular, but the real fun came with a change of focus to volume production ready-to-wear lines through the 1990s. They brought him nearer his ideal, unfashiony customers. This has always been a collaborative effort. Recently the Miyake Design Studio worked with the archive of the late Japanese graphic designer and Muji co-founder Ikko Tanaka, using an image from his 1981 poster of Nihon Buyo dance for a collection of Pleats Please clothes and accessories. In an essay for the 1997 exhibition catalogue Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, Miyake reflected, “Through his eyes Penn-san reinterprets the clothes, gives them new breath, and presents them to me from a new vantage point—one that I may not have been aware of, but had been subconsciously trying to capture. Without Penn-san’s guidance, I probably could not have continued to find new themes with which to challenge myself, nor could I have arrived at new solutions.” He ends by crediting Penn’s influence on his invention of permanently pleated garments, known as Pleats Please. Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Fashion: Face Covered with Hair (A), New York, 1991 Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Onion Flower Bud Coat, New York, 1987

Body of work: part of the current Miyake Issey Exhibition at the National Art Centre Tokyo. Photograph: Masaya Yoshimura/The Irving Penn Foundation The designer, known for his signature heat-pressed pleating technique, saw fashion as inherently optimistic and clothing as ‘like beautiful architecture for the body’ A star-like creation for Issey Miyake during the 1999-2000 autumn-winter ready-to-wear collections. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/EPAA comprehensive set of images from their work together is reproduced in the photobook Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake, published in 1999 and edited by Mark Holborn. To look at the photographs is to see how Penn essentializes Miyake’s designs, bestowing them with a graphic clarity and a highly dynamic sense of how they can be worn. The visual directness affirms the precise and calibrated way Miyake’s garments are designed and made, which is magnified by how Penn takes photographs. They possess a visual style that is highly readable, like animation or hieroglyphs. And this clarity arises, according to Holborn, in how “the work of one provides a mirror for the work of the other.” Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was witness to era-defining events, including the atomic bomb of 1945, a horror of which he rarely spoke but which led to his mother’s death. During a later period in Paris, he attended the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and apprenticed at Guy Laroche and Givenchy. He found himself among the tumult of the May 1968 student protests, prompting a desire to create clothing as easy and accessible as jeans and t-shirts. In New York, he worked for Geoffrey Beene and met Christo, Joe Eula, Donna Jordan and Robert Rauschenberg, before returning to Japan in 1970. Without Penn’s guidance, I probably could not have continued to find new themes with which to challenge myself, nor could I have arrived at new solutions,’ said Miyake of the unique collaboration, which was celebrated with an exhibition ‘Irving Penn and Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue’ at 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo in 2011. Numerous other exhibitions have celebrated Miyake’s work, including ‘Is Fashion Modern?’ at MoMA, New York; ‘Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology’ at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; and ‘Radical Fashion’ at the V&A, London; as well as a major retrospective at The National Art Center, Tokyo. Whether it is with paper or digital production techniques, Miyake’s team continues to innovate, most recently with the Bao Bao, a Blade Runner-style bag made from a flexible grid of vinyl triangles linked together with a polyester mesh. It is a bag that has truly gone viral. You see it everywhere, from the streets of Tokyo to the farmers’ markets of London. A-PoC Le Feu, by Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, 1999, an example of Miyake’s A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth) concept – extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments. Photograph: Yasuaki Yoshinaga/A-PoC Le Feu, Issey Miyake

Some label him an artist, others see him as a style visionary, but more than anything else, Issey Miyake is the designer’s designer. For more than four decades he has created textiles, clothing and accessories for people who embrace contemporary visual culture, but who find the notion of “fashion” at least slightly ludicrous. People, in fact, such as him. Sitting in a glass-walled corner room of his Shibuya design studio overlooking Yoyogi Park, and surrounded by immaculate postmodern vintage furniture by his late friend and collaborator Shiro Kuramata, he explains his credo. “I prefer the term ‘making things’,” he says. “I want to represent the action of thinking. We are working towards the concept of […] no fashion.” Tradition is very important to Miyake. It is the fusion of the most basic of materials and ancient of traditions with new and innovative techniques that has kept his brand at the forefront of fashion – technically if not always critically – for the past four and a half decades. One of his biggest fans was the late Zaha Hadid, who loved wearing his clothes. According to Lidewij Edelkoort, the fashion predictions guru who runs the company Trend Union, Miyake is the past, present and future of fashion. “How creative can one person be?” she asks. “It is exceptional for a living person to have this body of work. There is a consistency in taste, colour, shape, yet evolving innovation, and always this keen interest in textiles.” Happily I have a great team of designers, so I am free to exploreThe designer invited the photographer to document and interpret future collections, but so respectful was one master of the other, that Miyake was never in the room with Penn when the pictures were being taken. “I did not want to interfere with his freedom,” Miyake explains. “I wanted to see what he would do!” The late Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake held a rare appreciation for the role of image-making in design creativity. His longstanding working relationship with the photographer Irving Penn, whom he called Penn-san, is testament to Miyake’s understanding of how he could regard his work anew, by looking at it through the creative eye of another. Although Issey Miyake and the legendary photographer Irving Penn came from vastly different worlds and cultures, they were responsible for one of the most creative unions in fashion, one equally as iconic as Helmut Newton’s erotically charged photograph of YSL’s “Le Smoking” tuxedo, or more recently Juergen Teller’s skewed take on the aesthetic of Marc Jacobs. This month, the 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT cultural centre in Tokyo launches Irving Penn And Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue – a stunning document of their 13- year collaboration. Miyake came to define a radical Japanese aesthetic that shook up the fashion status quo in the 1980s and 90s.

To look at the photographs is to see how Penn essentializes Miyake’s designs, bestowing them with a graphic clarity and a highly dynamic sense of how they can be worn. Kitamura has been Miyake’s right-hand woman (she is now president of the company) since the mid-70s. It was her job to select pieces for the exhibition from thousands in their archive. She says that Miyake kept everything from the beginning, anticipating, perhaps, their importance. Miyake kept the sorrows of his childhood private until 2009, and remained secretive about his personal life: his closest companions were his work collaborators, especially the studio president, Midori Kitamura, a former model. Miyake never expected to reach old age. He was born in Hiroshima, the son of an army officer and a teacher, and evacuated to a nearby small town during the second world war. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, he was at primary school when he saw the flash of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven-year-old Miyake set out alone for the family house, 2.3km from the blast centre, searching among the heaped dead and dying for his mother. He has been researching the material and had been sent this particular paper, which was woven by hand by a craftswoman in Shiraishi in the Miyagi prefecture in the north of Japan. “She sent it to me to archive,” he tells me when we spoke after the press conference. He was keen to chat despite the fact that there was a crowd gathering in the entrance to the museum to hear him officially open the exhibition. One of his brightly coloured flying saucer dresses hovered above them as they waited, suspended from the ceiling.Before any collection makes it to Paris, everything is presented to Miyake himself at the studio’s somi (“general see”). Changes are sometimes made, but Miyake’s guiding hand is gentle and generous. “I always tell them that they don’t need me,” he says. “But I have to make sure that there is a concept with universal appeal. The work isn’t complete unless someone wears it. Also, I consider the somi a process of studying and learning – for myself. It’s crucial that the designers are establishing their own ideas.”