The Life and Works of Issey Miyake

Childhood and Early Traumas

Issey Miyake was born on April 22, 1938, in the city of Hiroshima, Japan. His birth name was Miyake Kazunaru. His childhood was marked by one of the most brutal events of the 20th century: he was only seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on his hometown in 1945. Miyake survived the nuclear attack, but he lost his mother three years later, a victim of the radiation effects. The trauma of the bomb never ceased to be part of the silent backdrop of his work, even though he avoided addressing it directly. Still, this event shaped his desire to create something constructive, sensitive, and human — perhaps in response to what destroyed everything around him.

The story of Issey Miyake in the post-bomb era is silent and, at the same time, deeply symbolic. It is not as documented as his later career, but it is possible to trace an emotional and geographical panorama based on what he let slip throughout his life — always with much reserve. Miyake was one of the many survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, an event that marked his personal life, his worldview, and, indirectly, his work.

The Post-Bomb: Losses, Silence, and Reconstruction

After the explosion of the atomic bomb, Miyake — at just seven years old — survived, but he lost his mother a few years later due to complications caused by radiation. He also suffered from minor physical aftereffects (such as leg problems) and, primarily, from profound psychological scars. Like many hibakusha (as the bomb survivors are called), he spent part of his childhood in a context of collective mourning, fear, and reconstruction.

The city of Hiroshima was almost entirely devastated. The lives of the local population were reorganized in makeshift shelters, destroyed schools, and field hospitals. Miyake, like thousands of others, lived in a Japan that sought to rise from the trauma, rebuilding not only cities but also identities and hopes.

Despite the losses, Miyake continued to live in Hiroshima for some time. He was raised by close relatives after losing his parents at a young age (his father had passed away before the war). His older brother became a figure of reference, and the Japanese family network — guided by a sense of collectivity — helped sustain his emotional base in the following years.

He rarely spoke publicly about this period. He only mentioned the subject directly in 2009, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, where he revealed, for the first time, that he was a survivor of the bomb. In that letter, he wrote:

“When I think about why I don’t like to talk about it, I think my reason is clear: I preferred to think about things that can be created, not destroyed. I preferred to dream about the future.”

This excerpt encapsulates the spirit with which he faced the post-war: instead of dwelling on the trauma, he chose to move forward. This does not mean forgetting, but transforming — suffering became a creative drive. It is very likely that this childhood marked by pain and reconstruction made him develop a deep sense of empathy, an immense respect for the body and the movement of life — which later became central pillars of his artistic practice and his perspective as a designer.

From Graphic Design to Fashion: A Silent Turn

In the 1950s, Miyake was still a young student, and Japan was experiencing a cultural renaissance. The West increasingly looked at the country with fascination, while Japan itself was trying to understand how to rise without abandoning its traditions. It was in this environment that he decided to study graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo. The choice was not by chance: he was interested in the relationship between form and function, image and communication.

During his years as a student, he became interested not only in objects and images, but in the idea that the body could also be a “design surface.” At that moment, he had a decisive contact with the fashion world: he saw reports and images of fashion shows by Christian Dior (especially the aesthetics of the New Look of the 1950s, with its sculptural shapes). These images awakened something that he later described as a “deep curiosity about how the body interacts with the fabric.”

More than the glamour of clothing, what fascinated Miyake was the system that united art, technique, materiality, and expression in a single functional object: clothing.

The Choice of Name

His full birth name was Kazunaru Miyake. When deciding that he would pursue fashion — a field still seen as minor in Japan at the time, especially for men — he adopted the stage name Issey, which means, in a poetic reading, something like “a river” or “a flowing current” (ichi = one, sei = current or life). This name can be interpreted as a choice of fluidity and reinvention, characteristics that would mark his entire trajectory.

More than a signature, “Issey Miyake” was a silent manifesto: a new name for a new identity, detaching from the trauma and rigidity of the past to announce a lighter, freer, more global future.

Paris and New York: The Cosmopolitan Education

In the 1960s, Miyake left Japan and went to Paris to study at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, where great names of haute couture were formed. There, he learned the classic techniques of Western fashion — draping, precise cutting, manual finishing — and worked with masters like Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy.

But the atmosphere was tense. Paris was living in the pre-May 1968 era, with strikes, political upheaval, and a youth questioning traditions. Miyake felt out of place. He saw the limits of haute couture: as technical and beautiful as it was, it was still destined for a few. This bothered him.

Subsequently, he moved to New York, where he worked with Geoffrey Beene. There, he encountered the language of sportswear, the streets, and functional design. He also immersed himself in the city’s artistic and multicultural scene: he found references in minimalism, pop art, modern dance, and urban graphics. New York opened Miyake’s awareness that fashion could be democratic, industrial, accessible — and still full of ideas.

Back to Japan: The Foundation of the Miyake Design Studio

In 1970, he returned to Japan and founded the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo. His idea was clear: he did not want to be a “designer” in the Western mold, but a visual thinker who used fashion as a language. Instead of following seasonal trends, Miyake treated clothing as ongoing research, an experimental territory between art, science, and body.

Right from the start, he wrote a phrase that became a kind of mission for the brand:

"I am not interested in fashion as a system. I am interested in clothing as a field of possibilities."

This difference is crucial. For Miyake, fashion was not an end, but a means: a means to question structures, to challenge techniques, to imagine futures.

The Aesthetic Signature of a Name

The name Issey Miyake soon became synonymous with innovation. In his early collections, he already combined Eastern techniques (such as the use of paper, raw cotton, traditional dyeing) with industrial fabrics and radical forms. He used the body not as a mannequin but as an agent: dancers and performers often replaced models in his shows.

Over time, his name ceased to be just a brand and became an idea: the idea that it is possible to create with depth, lightness, respect, and future.

References and Influences

Miyake's philosophy is deeply influenced by elements of Japanese culture, such as the concept of ma (the space between things), respect for the body in motion, and the traditions of Japanese industrial design. He also drew from sources such as the Bauhaus movement, Russian constructivism, and the thoughts of artists like Isamu Noguchi and designers like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto — his contemporaries who also subverted the Western logic of fashion in the 1980s.

Additionally, dance and movement were significant sources of inspiration. He worked with choreographers and performing artists to create garments that not only dressed but moved with the body fluidly and unexpectedly.

The Japanese Tradition — Aesthetics of the Impermanent

Miyake grew up immersed in the millennia-old aesthetic values of Japan, which shaped his sensitivity almost instinctively:

• Wabi-sabi: the beauty of imperfection, wear, and asymmetry. This appears in his garments with natural textures, organically pleated fabrics, and shapes that reject obvious symmetries.

• Ma (間): the space between things, emptiness as potency. Miyake took this concept into clothing by working on garments that respect the space of the body and movement, instead of imprisoning it. Many of his pieces seem to “float” over the body.

• Origami and Folds: he not only drew visual inspiration but technical inspiration as well — the way a flat surface transforms into volume is the basis of his creative method. This appears, for example, in the Pleats Please series, where the fabric is molded after the garment is made.

He also revived ancestral Japanese textile techniques — such as shibori dyeing, sashiko stitching, and washi paper weavings — but reconfigured them with cutting-edge technology. It was a rare balance: tradition and futurism, side by side.

The Western Art — Sculpture, Dance, Architecture

Miyake was passionate about modern and contemporary art — especially artists who thought of the body, space, and material as extensions of each other.

• Isamu Noguchi: the Japanese-American sculptor was one of Miyake's greatest inspirations. They both shared the idea that form arises from the relationship with space and time. Noguchi, who made furniture, lights, and gardens, influenced Miyake to create clothes-sculptures, but always movable, never static.

• Madeline Gins & Shusaku Arakawa: the couple of architects and artists was Miyake's conceptual partner. They viewed the body as an unstable field that moves in relation to space — exactly as Miyake viewed clothing.

• Martha Graham & Merce Cunningham: choreographers who used the body as a plastic language. Many of Miyake's shows were danced, not walked. He studied how clothing behaved in motion, and this directly influenced his cuts, volumes, and materials.

• Frank Gehry & Tadao Ando: architecture fascinated him as well. He would say that he wanted to build clothes like “small mobile architectures.” Gehry's fluidity and Ando's austerity combine in his volumes: precise structures, but never rigid.
  
  

Technology and Industrial Design

Unlike many designers of his time, Miyake always looked to the industry as an ally of creation. This connected him with designers and engineers:

Dieter Rams and the design of Braun: functional minimalism, absence of ornament, form following function — values that echo in the elegant simplicity of Miyake.

• Apple & Steve Jobs: Jobs himself wore a tailored black turtleneck made by Issey Miyake daily after they became friends in the late 1980s. They both saw design as a way to liberate the human being, not to complicate life.

Textile Technology: his creations with pleated polyester fabrics, pieces produced with a single thread (as in A-POC — A Piece of Cloth), and digital patterns placed him decades ahead of the industry. He saw textiles as “living matter,” capable of reacting to the body and time.

Clothing as Social Language

Miyake was also inspired by the clothing of the people, from everyday life:

• Kimonos, yukatas, uniforms: he deeply respected traditional Japanese clothing, which does not shape the body but envelops and reveals movement. This made him question the centrality of the Western body as a standard.

• Work Clothing: he was obsessed with functionality and comfort. He drew inspiration from clothing worn by workers, artists, dancers — all made to facilitate action, not to ostentate.

• Genderless, Timeless, Seasonless Clothing: long before these ideas became trends, Miyake was already designing collections that challenged categorization. His clothing dressed men, women, young, or old bodies with the same dignity and fluidity.
  
  

Philosophy and Spirituality

Miyake was silently philosophical. He was greatly influenced by Buddhism and Zen thinking, seeing the creative process as meditation. He didn't just want to make beautiful clothes — he wanted to reveal the invisible:

“I try to find the essence of dressing. Not what is beautiful, but what is necessary, and what can last.”

This search for essence distanced him from ego and brought him closer to collectivity: that is why he set up a collaborative studio, where the name Issey Miyake was not just an individual but a system of shared creation.

Brand Launch and First Steps

In 1970, Miyake founded the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo. From the beginning, his approach was interdisciplinary: he did not want to just "make fashion," but to develop ongoing research on the relationship between the human body, fabric, and technology. In 1973, he presented his first collection in Paris, integrating into the international fashion calendar.

His work quickly stood out for breaking conventional patterns. He eliminated seams, constructed pieces from a single piece of fabric, utilized artisan techniques like shibori (Japanese dyeing), while also appropriating new materials and industrial processes. This generated a unique paradox: pieces that seemed sculptures but were functional and extremely wearable.

1. The Bomb as Creative Silence

Issey Miyake never designed clothing “about war.” He was not a militant or pamphleteer designer, but his entire work silently and sophisticatedly carries the marks of post-Hiroshima. As a survivor of the bomb, Miyake experienced the extreme of physical vulnerability — the body as a target of destruction. This experience seems to have generated, in his work, an ethical inversion: he created to protect, liberate, and welcome the body.

Clothing as shelter, as space to breathe.

His silence on the subject was also a political choice: instead of “aestheticizing” suffering, he preferred to transmute it into construction. In the aforementioned letter to the New York Times in 2009, he stated that, when young, he avoided telling his story so as not to be labeled merely as a hibakusha. Fashion, for him, was a freedom of imagination.

2. Lightness, Movement, and Reconstruction

In the 1980s and 90s, while Western fashion sought ostentation and visual weight, Miyake proposed almost immaterial fabrics, shapes that distanced from the body without denying it, and structures that allowed total movement.

His Pleats Please line, for example, can be read as a poetic metaphor: very fine pleats, made from technical fabrics, light as air — but which gain shape when moving with the body. It is not an armor, it is an extension of vital energy.

This search for lightness references the reconstruction of Japan in the post-war, where design (graphic, architectural, product) played a fundamental role. The idea was to create new things from scarcity. No excesses, just the essential — but with beauty, innovation, and meaning. Miyake translated this into clothing.

3. Technology as Poetry

Throughout his career, Miyake sought what he called "technopoetics": the use of innovation and science in service of sensitivity. Instead of seeing technology as something cold, he viewed it as a tool for multiplying human freedom.

An example is the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) series, which represents a deeply Japanese thought: the entire piece is made of a single continuous thread, as if the body could dress an idea without interruption. This logic also echoes the philosophy of ma — the space between things, fertile emptiness.

In this sense, technology, for him, was not distant from nature. It was an unfolding of it. His synthetic fabrics behaved like leaves in the wind. His pieces resembled folded flowers or architectural folds — always dialoguing with impermanence, a central theme of Japanese aesthetics (wabi-sabi).

4. The Body as Seed of the Future

Miyake believed that clothing should serve the body and not the other way around. A free body, in motion, capable of dancing, aging, expressing its uniqueness. This gains even more depth when we remember that he saw, at seven years old, the annihilation of thousands of bodies in an instant.

His work, then, can be read as a silent manifesto for life. Each piece is a small gesture of reconstruction — fabric by fabric, fold by fold.

5. Hiroshima as Origin and Horizon

Even though it was not an explicit theme, Hiroshima is the symbolic origin of all of Miyake's work. The devastated city that silently reconstructs echoes in the way his clothing emerges: almost without seams, as if they had always been there, sprouting from the body and time.

Post-bomb Japan transformed into a laboratory of the future. And Miyake was one of its most poetic engineers.

The Journey with the Brand: Constant Invention

In the 1980s and 90s, Miyake revolutionized fashion with two major inventions:

1. PLEATS PLEASE (1993):

A line based on permanent pleats in technological fabrics, extremely light, that could be washed, rolled up, stored without wrinkling and worn elegantly and practically. This line became a symbol of versatility and was adopted by artists, dancers, and intellectuals worldwide.

The Pleats Please is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Issey Miyake’s thought. More than a line of clothing, it is the materialization of his philosophy of uniting body, technology, and freedom. Deeply connected to the idea of movement and accessibility, the Pleats Please revolutionized fashion design by creating garments that dance with the body and survive over time.

"How to create clothes that move with the body, not against it?”

The seed of Pleats Please began to germinate in the late 1980s, when Miyake started experimenting with new pleating forms that would not deform with use. He wanted clothes that would accompany the body in motion — especially the bodies of performers and dancers, like those from Ballet Frankfurt, of choreographer William Forsythe, with whom he worked.

Traditional pleated clothing would lose its shape after being washed or worn — requiring extreme care. Miyake, on the contrary, wanted the opposite: clothing that was durable, lightweight, washable, easy to store and wear. Democratic, practical, and beautiful.

In 1993, this idea took shape as a commercial line: Pleats Please Issey Miyake was born.

Traditional pleating works as follows: first, the fabric is pleated (with heat and pressure), then it is cut and sewn. This restricts shaping and makes the clothes delicate.

Miyake reversed the process:

• First, the garment is cut and sewn three times larger than the final size.

• Then, the already assembled piece undergoes a thermal and pressure process that pleats the entire fabric — using a combination of heat, folding, and metal molds.

• The result: a pleated garment that is born with its final shape and never loses the pleats, even after washing.

The main fabric used was high-performance polyester — lightweight, durable, fast-drying, and with shape memory. The choice of synthetic was not by chance: Miyake believed that the future of clothing was not in the luxury of rare materials, but in the intelligence of construction.

Visually, the Pleats Please is a charming paradox:

• Extremely simple when viewed on a hanger — often straight, tubular, almost monastic.

• Highly sculptural when worn — molding and following the body in motion like a second skin that vibrates.

The texture of the pleats creates a life of its own: the garments gain shadow, rhythm, elasticity, and even sound. The body becomes an active part of the design.

The colors are another highlight: intense, vibrant, often fluorescent or with graphic prints inspired by contemporary art and pop culture. It was a way to say that functionality does not need to be neutral or minimalist — it can be playful, affirmative, full of presence.

The Pleats Please was conceived as a day-to-day line. It condensed Miyake’s desire to bring cutting-edge design to people’s daily lives. It was the antithesis of haute couture: it did not need to be pressed, could be folded into a bag, was ideal for travel, for bodies in motion, for different ages, sizes, and styles.

With this, he broke the idea that avant-garde fashion is inaccessible. Pleats Please was — and still is — museum fashion that can go to the grocery store.

The line grew and became one of the most iconic within the Issey Miyake group. So much so that even after his death in 2022, it continues to be one of the best-selling and most celebrated. It is no surprise that many of its pieces are part of museum collections such as MoMA, V&A, and the Kyoto Costume Institute.

Furthermore, Pleats Please inspired developments such as:

• "me Issey Miyake" – a young, accessible line based on the same principles.

• Pleats Please Perfumes – a sensory extension of the brand.

• And collaborative capsule collections, such as with contemporary Japanese visual artists.

“I do not think of the body as a fixed thing. The body changes. Time changes. Clothes must follow this change.”

2. A-POC – A Piece of Cloth (1997):

Both lines stem from a shared radical desire:

"Redefine the way the body and fabric meet. Make clothing arise from movement, and not the other way around."

If Pleats Please is the exploration of pleating as an expansion of movement, A-POC aims to create garments that are born whole, in a single piece of fabric, shaped by algorithms, without cutting, sewing, or waste. They are two sides of the same thought:

• Pleats Please = sculpture of the body in movement.

• A-POC = architecture of clothing in time and space.

Launched in 1997, in collaboration with designer and engineer Dai Fujiwara, the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) project was a total break with the industrial logic of fashion.

The piece is generated from a software that weaves, in continuous mesh, a three-dimensional garment, already embedded with all the details: collar, sleeves, fittings. The user can cut out the desired shape directly from the fabric tube, as if the clothing was "asleep" inside the mesh, waiting to be awakened.

It is a garment that:

• is born from thread to body, without manual intervention.

• eliminates scraps and waste (extremely sustainable).

• can be customized by the user, which breaks the separation between creator and consumer.

Miyake did not just want to create new clothes. He wanted to reinvent the production system of fashion.

Both lines are born from the same ethic of the body in flow:

• In Pleats Please, the body molds the garment with movement — each step, each gesture alters the behavior of the piece.

• In A-POC, the body participates in the creation of its own clothing — the user chooses how to cut it, how to wear it, how to complete it.

This passage from physical movement to digital movement shows how Miyake always operated between the artisanal and the futuristic.

Both lines:

• challenge the timing of traditional fashion (they are timeless, working outside the system of seasonal collections).

• prioritize freedom of use: they fit all ages, genders, and body styles.

• maintain a sense of lightness, fluidity, and formal democracy.

Miyake would say that his work was not about "fashion," but about life in motion. Both in Pleats and in A-POC, the focus is on the everyday elevated to art. These are clothes that accompany you in your daily life but can also be in a gallery or on a stage.

“I think of clothing as tools for the body to live more fully.”

— Issey Miyake

Living Legacy: Thought as Legacy

Today, these two lines continue to be operated by design teams that were formed under his philosophy. Pleats Please Issey Miyake and A-POC ABLE Issey Miyake are branches of the same creative trunk.

Legacy and Philosophy

Issey Miyake passed away in August 2022, but his legacy remains one of the most consistent and visionary in 20th and 21st-century fashion. He believed in clothing that "celebrates life," and his practice sought to unite the traditional and the futuristic, the artisanal and the technological, the local and the universal.

More than a designer, Miyake was a visual thinker. His work not only challenged the limits of clothing as an object but reimagined its function as an extension of human freedom. For him, dressing was a way of thinking — with intelligence, poetry, and invention.