MIYAKE ISSEY EXHIBITION: The Work of Miyake Issey.

Three rooms in Roppongi

MIYAKE ISSEY EXHIBITION: The Work of Miyake Issey opened at The National Art Center, Tokyo, from 16 March to 13 June 2016, in Special Exhibition Gallery 2E. The museum organised it together with The Miyake Issey Foundation, Miyake Design Studio and Issey Miyake Inc.

The exhibition looked back on 45 years of Miyake's work, counted from 1970. The space was divided into three rooms, designed by Tokujin Yoshioka and Taku Satoh. Yoshioka made a mannequin for the show called Grid Body, a figure built from a grid, so the clothes could stand without a full body inside them.

That detail says much about the whole show. The mannequin does not play a model. It is only a frame, enough for the cloth to have somewhere to fall. Visitors look at the garment, not at a figure.

Around the galleries there were talks with people who had worked with Miyake, and workshops on pleating and folding, some of them for primary school children. Clothes here were not only for looking at. They were a technique one could learn by hand.

From the Tattoo jumpsuit to Pleats Please

The first part took visitors back to the 1970s. The Tattoo jumpsuit of 1970 printed images onto cloth that clung to the body like a second skin. The linen jumpsuits of 1975 went the other way: loose, flat, almost without curves. Those two directions, close and loose, run through his whole career.

In 1984 came Waterfall Body, designs that let cloth fall with gravity and nearly find its own shape. The maker does not force the fabric into a mould. The fabric does its share of the work.

Then the 1990s and the pleats. In 1993 Miyake launched PLEATS PLEASE. The method reversed habit: the garment was cut and sewn first, then pleated with heat. The pleats therefore follow every seam. The clothes are light, fold small, need no ironing after washing, and move with the wearer.

The pleat is not decoration. It is structure. It lets one flat piece of cloth fit many bodies without being tailored to each.

A-POC and 132 5.

In 1998 Miyake and the engineer Dai Fujiwara developed A-POC, short for A Piece of Cloth. A knitting machine produces a continuous tube of fabric in which the outlines of garments are already knitted. The wearer cuts along those lines to release a dress, a top, socks. Little sewing is needed. The user takes part in making their own clothes.

In 2010 came 132 5. ISSEY MIYAKE. These garments fold into flat shapes, close to folded paper. Lifted, they open into clothes with volume. Flat to volume, then flat again. The garment lives in two states.

The three projects are years apart but ask the same question. Can a garment be made with as few steps as possible? Can cloth, heat, machines and the wearer each do their part?

Asking that question is why Miyake is often called a designer more than a couturier. He worked with textile technology, with engineers, with factories. Beauty came afterwards, as a result.

Why a clothing show reads like a design show

Many fashion exhibitions stage clothes like statues: strong light, tall mannequins, dramatic poses. The Work of Miyake Issey chose otherwise. The grid mannequins nearly disappear. The garment becomes something to study for its structure: how the pleat runs, how the cloth folds, where the cut lies.

Walking through the three rooms felt more like moving through a research studio than a show. Visitors met someone who had spent nearly half a century testing one idea again and again: a piece of cloth, and the body inside it.

Issey Miyake died in 2022. Looking back, the 2016 exhibition gathered his work into one line in Tokyo, the city he was tied to. Those who want to see Miyake beside Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto can read Future Beauty, thirty years of Japanese fashion. The clothes remain, folded in archives, waiting to be opened again.