The life of Japanese couturier Issey Miyake will go down as one of the most unique destinies in the history of fashion in the second half of the 20th century.e century. A career that will have seen him create, invent, travel, dream, use all possible resources, artistic or technological, in the service of his clothes. He, whose ambition was to design clothes for everyone, to imagine new outfits that would have the practicality and simplicity of jeans or a T-shirt, will have constantly sought to exceed the limits of his profession. . And he will thus have invented a signature, a very quickly identifiable style, which stands out from that of his contemporaries, with a taste for bright colors and pleated fabrics. The Japanese designer died in Tokyo on August 5, following liver cancer, at the age of 84, announced to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Tuesday August 9, an employee of his office in Tokyo.
In 1986, in the pages of WorldColette Godard, feather in the world of theatre, described the effect produced by her outfits in these terms: “At Issey Miyake, the eye is amazed, wanders in search of a sign of recognition. But everything is sham. The draperies, starting from who knows where, end up nowhere, roll up, slip, slip into the folds which fly away in scarves, stoles, and are flattened obliquely, crushing the busts before taking off and swell around the hips before flowing in trains that rise, revealing tights that imitate spun stitches, tears. »
With three cultures
If everything was illusions, it is perhaps because he had been, from early childhood, confronted with the harshest reality. He was 6 years old when his hometown, Hiroshima, was bombed. He was then 3 kilometers from the epicenter of the atomic explosion, perched on hills from where he witnessed the nuclear catastrophe. His mother will die as a result of her burns, and he himself will suffer from a bone disease that will mark him for life. He grew up in traumatized post-war Japan, where American influence affected all areas, particularly ready-to-wear. From there will undoubtedly come his obsession with inventing archetypes, as American popular culture does, and the essential question of his future career, as summarized by journalist Caroline Rousseau, in 2016, in The world : “If the Americans knew how to impose this daily wardrobe, what can a Japanese respond to them? »
After beginning his studies in Tokyo, he left for France in the mid-1960s and enrolled in the school of the Parisian Couture Union Chamber. Quickly, he works for Guy Laroche and for Hubert de Givenchy. French couture was still very quiet, and he left for New York, where he frequented the art world, then in full reinvention. Drawing on three cultures, he launched his own brand in Tokyo at the very beginning of the 1970s. Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of the American edition of voguevery influential in the middle, the adoube.
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