In the front row at the fashion shows only Suzy Menkes actually wears it. The legendary critic is clearly comfortable in Issey Miyake’s roomy and severely pleated dresses. You can understand it one way or the other: is this clothing only for old women? Or are they fashionable designs that you can still wear when you are approaching 80? You have to understand it this way: Issey Miyake has become a classic.
Now the designer, who had long since retired from being a classic into private life, has fallen silent: On Tuesday it was announced that Miyake died last Friday at the age of 84 as a result of liver cancer. Only relatives attended the funeral. According to his brand, a memorial service is not planned.
“A modern and optimistic form of creativity”
The quiet farewell of the designer, who was one of the greatest Japanese fashion designers along with Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and Kenzo Takada, fits the image of a calm, concentrated, hard-working man. The introspective designer needed fashion to come out of himself. It is therefore no coincidence that the folds in his designs protrude three-dimensionally from the textile surface – like messages to the outside world, also like a sharp-edged protection against the demands of life.
It is probably not biographical arrogance to look for the reason for his fashion in the trauma of his life. The boy, who was born on April 22, 1938 in Hiroshima, witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 at school when he was seven. “When I close my eyes I still see things no one should ever see,” he later wrote. “I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me and prefer to think of things to create rather than destroy, and which bring beauty and joy. I chose clothing design because it is a modern and optimistic form of creativity.”
The memories stayed
Many family members died. His mother died three years later from the effects of the radiation. He himself developed bone marrow disease from the age of ten and had a lifelong limp. It was impossible for him to repress the primal experience. The memories of the bright red light, the black cloud, the people fleeing in panic remained. He didn’t want to be called “the designer who survived the bomb”. Maybe that’s why the effort to build a brand that established a different reputation with its unique style.
Actually, he wanted to be a dancer or an athlete. His sister’s fashion magazines set him on a new path in life. After studying design at the Tama Art Academy in Tokyo, he worked in Paris for Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy and in New York for Geoffrey Beene. Finally, in 1970, he founded his Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo. Against the work of the couturiers, which he found too static, he set his role as a designer as a reflex to his sporting beginnings, namely “designing something that works in real life”.
