Author: mangakiko

The 1960s often attempted to imagine the future of clothes – take a look at the designer Hardy Amies’ wardrobe for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, period pieces unmistakably from 1968. But while Amies clad Kubrick’s space hostesses in hard-seamed mod shifts , Issey Miyake was working on his first “constructible clothes” – knit pieces to be layered together at whim. Their seemingly simple shapes are soft, and their novel synthetic yarns sympathetic. They haven’t dated a day, and still look like they might be the future.

Miyake, who has died aged 84, always said he was not interested in fashion, only in design for living. He cared about relationships between people and the cloth enfolding and enwrapping their bodies, about cloth’s fibers and techniques. His simplicity of him referred back, to the ancient principles of Japanese clothing, rectangles off the loom folded and tacked together into garments, and forward, to computer-controlled processes for his 2000 line A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth), which extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments.

Miyake regarded craft skills and developing chemistry and technology with equal curiosity – his polyester Bao Bao bags are hard plaques on a mesh backing, tough but flexible like samurai armour. He was an early adopter of digital design for large-scale manufacture by computerized machinery. The more precise and perfect the repeatable process, the closer it came to craft.

His most successful concept, Pleats Please, owed its crimped, tree-bark-like aesthetics to ancient Greek linen garments as imitated by Mariano Fortuny, with his draped 1910s gowns, and its relative affordability to new pleating machines that superheat-bake texture into polyester with a memory.

Miyake’s hundreds of pleated costumes for William Forsythe’s The Loss of Small Detail at Frankfurt Ballet in 1991 fed into the experiment too, and at the line’s 1993 launch, dancer models extracted every joule of kinetic energy out of swirling those garments; Irving Penn joyfully photographed them. In turn, Miyake outfits became gala favorites with ballerinas and classical musicians, guaranteed not to crush when the conductor hugged them. Architects appreciated him too. His most celebrated repeat customer was Apple’s Steve Jobs, who specified to the millimeter the sleeve length of the many black turtlenecks he ordered.

Miyake investigated and delighted in materials, saying: “Material for clothing is limitless: anything can make clothing.” That included the wood cellulose of his 1963 student designs for the Toyo Rayon company; pineapple fiber and rubber; paper, rattan and bamboo – a traditional craftsman wove these into the Miyake bodice that Artforum magazine put on its cover in 1982, the first garment it had deemed worthy of the honour.

Above all, he had unusual respect for materials derived from fossil fuels, seeing plastic, nylon and all the polys not as cheap disposable substitutes for natural substances, but as themselves having unique properties – polyfibres he developed with adventurous manufacturers were machine-washable, uncrushable , stretchy and kind to skin. Hi-tech production processes reduce yarn as well as fabric waste; his garments from him were visually timeless and made to last physically. Miyake never thought of hydrocarbons as infinite resources to burn. Their complex chemistry and potential uses were precious – the heat of long-gone suns made clothes and ingredients for his water-themed perfumes, starting with L’Eau d’Issey in 1992. In the 21st century, his Tokyo Reality Lab recycled plastic bottle tops into durable, wearable cloth.

The Lab was the project of Miyake’s lively old age, after he handed over design responsibility for eight main lines, including décor, and the running of international sales and stores, to personally chosen successors through the 2000s (his firm remains privately owned). Besides being a crucial research and development facility, and a liaison base with craftworkers, machinery-makers, suppliers and digital experimenters, it was an academy of design, where staff who had been with him since he opened his original design studio in 1970 shared expertise with young recruits. His longtime favorite word of him, and practice, was monozukurithe making of things, which meant so much more than manufacturing.

Miyake never expected to reach old age. He was born in Hiroshima, the son of an army officer and a teacher, and evacuated to a nearby small town during the second world war. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, he was at primary school when he saw the flash of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven-year-old Miyake set out alone for the family house, 2.3km from the blast center, searching among the heaped dead and dying for his mother.

She had survived, badly burned, and died three years later, after nursing him through osteomyelitis, the radiation disease he contracted, which lamed him. What sustained Miyake growing up in an impoverished, slowly rebuilding city was painting – too poor to buy brushes, he worked with his fingers – and the Peace Bridge there, with Isamu Noguchi’s profound concrete balustrade symbolizing the future, which he crossed on his way to painting classes. Older fellow students at Hiroshima Kokutaiji high school, some of whom died young of radiation sicknesses, told Miyake about Noguchi, who became his hero (and later, friend) of him. Miyake thought he would die young too, so he took a risk on being a designer.

Images in his sister’s magazines interested him in clothes, but it was not a possible subject of male study in 1950s Japan, and to placate his father he took graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo. As a student he wrote in 1960 to the secretariat for the World Design Conference, held in Japan that year, wanting to know why clothes were not part of its programme.

There was nowhere to study couture, so once Japan permitted travel abroad on a tiny budget, he went to Paris in 1965 for a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and interned for Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy. The important Parisian education, though, was the student protests of 1968, revolting against the haute-bourgeoisie, usual customers for couture. Miyake sided with the students, wanting to make clothes, both wilder and more useful, for ordinary people, unconstrained by age, size, gender or fit.

Miyake went on to New York in 1969 as an assistant for Geoffrey Beene, to learn about mass production. But in 1970, another bout of radiation-related disease returned him to Tokyo for treatment, where friends loaned him the money to start Miyake Design Studio. In his remarkable first show in Tokyo, a model stripped off many layers until nude, a scandal that alarmed his sponsors and made clear his originality.

In 1973, he began to show in Paris, distinctively different from other Japanese designers arriving there. His regular collections of sculptured, high-end clothes were spectacular, but the real fun came with a change of focus to volume production ready-to-wear lines through the 1990s. They brought him nearer his ideal, unfashionable customers of him.

As well as the Reality Lab, Miyake in “retirement” set up Japan’s first design museum, 21_21 Design Sight, in Tokyo, with the architect Tadao Ando, ​​its enfolding steel roof based on a piece of cloth. Miyake’s own creations have been exhibited and collected by museums, including in London, New York and Paris. Japan awarded him its Order of Culture in 2010.

Miyake kept the sorrows of his childhood private until 2009, and remained secretive about his personal life: his closest companions were his work collaborators, especially the studio president, Midori Kitamura, a former model.

When Thomas bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend Mel, he anticipated the proposal would take place on their upcoming holiday abroad in Europe.

But COVID-19 had other plans and, after a widespread imposition of restrictions and border closures, the duo’s exciting holiday quickly turned to dust.

Mel – who, at the time, was oblivious to Thomas’ plans for a proposal – says the self-professed “nerds” had planned to trek through the picturesque Scottish Highlands and ride on the steam train that inspired Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express.

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The couple then anticipated on finishing the day of adventures at the infamous “Loch Ness” lake, where Thomas planned to pop the question.

Looking back on “what should have been,” Mel tells 9Honey, “his whole proposal idea was very on brand for us because we’re kind of geeky couple.”

In the lead up to the pandemic, Mel and Thomas – who had been together for three years – had been speaking about getting married.

“I always used to say to him, my deadline is 40,” Mel jokes. “I just didn’t want to be in my 40s and getting married – I felt like there was a bit of a stigma. And we had been together for three years so I was like ‘that’s kind of a good enough time.'”

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With the seed planted in his head, and after months of conversations, Thomas finally purchased a ring for Mel and made “epic” plans for the proposal.

But while he was still waiting on the ring, COVID hit and, with the trip to Europe cancelled, there was no choice to start getting creative with different proposal ideas.

“We live in Melbourne and at the peak of COVID we didn’t know when the restrictions were going to be lifted,” Mel says. “He thought to propose in the backyard but then he thought ‘that’s not really that exciting’… He wanted a place where we could come back to in the future, a special place.”

As weeks went by, Thomas waited until the metro and regional border restrictions eased and then promptly booked a romantic trip to the countryside.

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“I’ve booked a weekend away to Phillip Island, and planned to propose on a walk along the beach at a really picturesque area. What could possibly go wrong?”

However, life had other plans for the couple and Mel laughs as she recalls, “the trip ended up being a comedy of errors.”

“We drove about two hours from our place to Phillip Island and I got a little bit carsick so I wanted to have a lie down before any beach stroll,” Mel says. “So we checked into the room and I was like ‘can I just lie here for a bit’ but he was really keen to get moving, and I just was not in the mood.”

As it started to get dark outside, Thomas eventually managed to persuade Mel to go for a walk on the beach, but the obstacles didn’t stop there.

“When we went to the beach there were all these drunk teens and we realized it was schoolies weekend,” Mel recalls. “We were just walking around and we were getting pranked by all these teens who were trying to tick things off their bucket list… One guy even went asking for my number.”

In a panic, Thomas tried to find a more secluded beach, but the only one he could find nearby on Google Maps was under maintenance and didn’t have lighting.

“The vibe at the time was more befitting of a horror movie than a rom-com,” Mel jokes. “So I have decided to wait until the morning.”

The next morning, the sun had come out and Thomas took Mel for a coastal walk at Cape Woolami, when he was finally able to get down on one knee to propose to her.

“It was no Nessie or Harry Potter, but the proposal was still just as magical,” Mel says.

In February this year the couple tied the knot, in a “special” ceremony surrounded by their family and friends.

“It was special for a lot of reasons. Due to COVID, we hadn’t had a chance to see all of our friends and family for a very long time, and aside from obviously celebrating us and our relationship, it was a chance to come together with our favorite people.”

Despite all the obstacles they faced in the lead up, Mel couldn’t be happier with he outcome and wouldn’t change anything for the world.

“I can’t think of my life being without him. Especially going through the pandemic as well, it really tested how much we wanted to be with each other and just highlighted the support that we gave each other through the ups and downs.”

A huge thank you to online wedding directory and planning service Easy Weddings for their assistance with this story.

For more moments from Honey’s series ‘The Moment I Said Yes’, click here.

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