Issey Miyake

Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has died aged 84, an employee at his office in Tokyo told AFP ...

“He died on the evening of August 5,” she said over the telephone, without giving further details of his death and declining to be named. Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has died aged 84, an employee at his office in Tokyo told AFP on Tuesday. Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has died aged 84.

He was known for his innovative origami-like designs, creating skirts, dresses and trousers with prisms of unfolding shapes.

He was most closely associated with Midori Kitamura, who started as a fit model in his studio, worked with him for nearly 50 years and now serves as president of his design studio. He was one of the first Japanese designers to show in Paris and was part of a revolutionary wave of designers that brought Japanese fashion to the rest of the world, opening the door for later contemporaries like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo. A famously private person, the designer was known for his close relationships with his longtime co-workers and collaborators, whom he credited with being essential to his success. Still, he was perhaps best known as a designer whose styles combined the discipline of fashion with technology and art. Mr. Miyake was feted in Japan for creating a global brand that contributed to the country’s efforts to build itself into an international destination for fashion and pop culture. His insistence that clothing was a form of design was considered avant-garde in the early years of his career, and he had notable collaborations with photographers and architects.

Japanese designer Issey Miyake, famed for his pleated style of clothing that never wrinkles and who produced the signature black turtleneck of friend and ...

In the late 1980s, he developed a new way of pleating by wrapping fabrics between layers of paper and putting them into a heat press, with the garments holding their pleated shape. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic." Miyake was born in Hiroshima and was seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city while he was in a classroom. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

TOKYO — Issey Miyake, who built one of Japan's biggest fashion brands and was known for his boldly sculpted pleated pieces as well as former Apple CEO Steve ...

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Miyake defined an era in Japan's modern history, reaching stardom in the 1970s with his origami-like pleats that transformed usually crass polyester into ...

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was a star as soon as he hit the European runways. Miyake kept his family life private, and survivors are not known. His down-to-earth clothing was meant to celebrate the human body regardless of race, build, size or age.

After surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a child, Miyake turned to clothes as a modern, optimistic form of creativity, and revived the use of ...

And the first 15 years of his atelier's production is captured in a lavishly cool monograph, Issey Miyake & Miyake Design Studio 1970-1985 (Works Words Years) (1985). A landmark retrospective of his workwas held at the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2016, covering 45 years of his design work. As well as the Met, his clothes are held by insitutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Denver Art Museum, where pieces by Miyake and Yamamoto are hung alongside Japanese traditional garments. Miyake handed over the running of his business, which had expanded into fragrances—including L'eau d'Issey—and other merchandise, to others in 1997, to focus on research into new fabrics and production techniques, fuelled by his interest in the connection between technology and creativity. In 2009, Miyake, who had long been reluctant to be labelled "the designer who survived the atomic bomb", wrote a powerful op-ed articleon his experience for the New York Times, in which he encouraged then-US president Barack Obama to visit the city to demonstrate his commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. Miyake made another kind of headline when he supplied what became a trademark polyester-cotton turtleneck to the co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, a piece of clothing that became as much of a brand marker for the biggest tech company in the world as the bitten-apple logo and the curve of a corner on the iPhone. On a trip to Japan in the 1980s, Jobs had admired the practical chic of the grey uniforms worn by Sony workers, and that company's chief, Akio Morita, told him that Miyake had designed them. But Miyake, who did not care for the cost and impracticality of haute couture, brought this side of his work to the high street in 1993 with his Pleats Please clothes—now collectors' items—where heat-treated polyester was used to create genuinely unisex, permanently pleated, free-flowing, one-size-fits-all garments.