Clothing as Architecture: Issey Miyake’s Pleats, Planes and A Piece of Cloth
Issey Miyake treated cloth as a building material. A Pleats Please dress folds flat and keeps its shape; an A-POC garment begins as a tube of fabric and is cut by the wearer; a Bao Bao bag is a grid of triangles that rearranges itself around what it carries. The language is structural, and the studio’s vocabulary is that of engineering. This essay follows the chronology that makes the claim of architecture credible.
A Hiroshima childhood and a studio in Tokyo
Issey Miyake was born in Hiroshima on 22 April 1938 and survived the bombing of the city at the age of seven. He stayed silent about it for decades, wishing not to be known as the ‘A-bombed designer’, and first spoke publicly in an essay in the New York Times in July 2009. He died in Tokyo on 5 August 2022, of hepatocellular carcinoma. Miyake Design Studio dates from 1970. His first overseas collection was shown in New York in 1971 and his first Paris collection was for autumn/winter 1973, several years before Kawakubo and Yamamoto arrived.
Pleats Please, 1991 to 1993
Pleats Please was previewed in Paris in March 1991 and launched in 1993. The technique is the point: the garment is cut and sewn oversized in polyester jersey and then pleated, by machine, between sheets of paper, which keeps the shape permanently and makes the clothes light, packable and almost uncreasable. L’Eau d’Issey, the fragrance, had arrived in 1992 with the perfumer Jacques Cavallier. Today the pleats are the most recognisable object in Japanese fashion, and the line’s menswear branch, Homme Plissé, can be traced to 2013.
A-POC and the tube of cloth
A-POC, ‘A Piece of Cloth’, was begun in 1998 with the textile engineer Dai Fujiwara and announced as a brand in 1999; The Art Newspaper gives 1997. The idea was to let a machine produce a continuous tube of knitted fabric in which the shapes of garments were already programmed, so that the wearer cut along the lines and made the piece. It converted fashion into a form of instruction, which is why the museum world took it up so quickly.
Geometric bags and folded cloth
Bao Bao was a prototype in 2000 inside Pleats Please and became an independent label from autumn/winter 2010. The studio’s page dates 132 5. to summer 2010, from research begun in 2007 in its Reality Lab, which makes folded paper-like garments from recycled polyester; Wikipedia says 2014. The Miyake Issey Foundation was established in 2004 and 21_21 Design Sight opened in 2007.
The turtleneck
A famous story has Miyake making Steve Jobs’s black turtlenecks. It rests wholly on Jobs’s own account, in Walter Isaacson’s biography, in which he says he had a hundred of them. There is no comment from Miyake on record, so it is better told as Jobs’s story than as a documented commission.
What collectors look for
- Pleats Please garments with their care labels and the original season tag; check seams and hems.
- Bao Bao bags in the early colourways.
- The early studio pieces and artist collaborations, which sit apart from the commercial lines.
- Scale. Japanese sizes run small. Take flat measurements and see our sizing guide or the Designer Archives guide.
Why Japan
Pleats Please is a Japanese everyday garment. It was bought in department-store sections, worn on long journeys and kept for years, and the Japanese pre-owned wardrobe holds seasons that would be rare in Paris or New York.
In the archive now
Continue reading
- Japanese Fashion as Design Philosophy
- Rei Kawakubo: Against Clothing
- Yohji Yamamoto: The Discipline of Silence
- Encyclopedia entry · The Fashionista Bible
Looking for a Pleats Please colourway or a Bao Bao season? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan’s private collector circles on your behalf.
Index terms: issey miyake · pleats please · homme plisse · a-poc · bao bao · 132 5. · miyake design studio · l’eau d’issey · issey miyake archive