"Issey Miyake: Pleats Please" 1990 PENN, Irving
$450
Irving Penn
[40] pp.
Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art
1990
12" x 8 1/2"
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(Tokyo): Touko Museum of Contemporary Art 1990. First edition. Fine 4to. Text in English and Japanese. Two-part catalogue of the exhibition at the Touko Museum of Contemporary Art, September 1 – 30, 1990 (the third major exhibition of the noted designer); notable for the second part, featuring 14 color photographs by Irving Penn. Foreword by Sukejiro Itani; essays by Nicholas Serota and 2 others. Near fine volumes in printed card slipcase.
Issey Miyake (三宅 一生, Miyake Issei, 22 April 1938 – 5 August 2022) was a Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances, such as L'eau d'Issey, which has become his best-known product.
He studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964. He entered designs into fashion competition at the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo. However, he did not win a competition due to his lack of pattern-making or sewing skills. After graduation, he enrolled in the Chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne school in Paris and was apprenticed to Guy Laroche as assistant designer. He also worked with Hubert de Givenchy, drawing 50 to 100 sketches daily.
In 1969, he moved to New York City, where he met artists like Christo and Robert Rauschenberg. He was enrolled in English classes at Columbia University and worked on Seventh Avenue for designer Geoffrey Beene. Returning to Tokyo in 1970, he founded the Miyake Design Studio, a high-end producer of women's fashion.
From a young age, Miyake respected artist Isamu Noguchi, whose newness and sense of fun in his designs inspired Miyake. He was also inspired by fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet's use of geometric calculations and "a single piece of beautiful cloth." In Paris, he visited several museums and he mentioned that he was influenced by sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti.
San Francisco Chronicle fashion editor Sylviia Rubin credits Miyake together with Babette Pinsky with "reinventing" the Fortuny pleat in the 1980s.
In the late 1980s, he began to experiment with new methods of pleating that would allow both flexibility of movement for the wearer as well as ease of care and production. The garments are cut and sewn first, then sandwiched between layers of paper and fed into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric's 'memory' holds the pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are ready-to wear. He did the costume for Ballett Frankfurt with an ultra feather-polyester jersey permanently pleated in a piece named "the Loss of Small Detail" William Forsythe and also work on ballet "Garden in the setting". Miyake realized that the new method of making clothes fit well in dancers. After studying how dancers move, he sent 200 to 300 garments for dancers to wear a different one in each performance of The Last Detail. This led to the development of the Pleats, Please range and inspired him to use dancers to display his work.