What Issey Miyake is known for
The master of pleats and technological fabric innovation. From Bao Bao bags to Pleats Please — Japanese fashion as wearable architecture.
Issey Miyake treated clothing as a technology problem with a poet's deadline. From 1970 in Tokyo his studio pursued one idea — "a piece of cloth," the garment born from a single plane — through innovations the industry is still metabolizing: Pleats Please (1993), garments pleated after cutting so they spring eternally back to shape, pack like paper and never wrinkle; A-POC ("A Piece Of Cloth"), clothes engineered as continuous tubes of fabric the wearer cuts free.
The Bao Bao bag put the research in every train carriage — a mesh of rigid triangles that collapses and reforms like origami architecture. Steve Jobs' black turtleneck was Miyake's; the designer made him roughly a hundred.
Miyake died in 2022, but the house was always built as a studio rather than a signature — the Miyake Design Studio's teams carry the lines forward, and the Reality Lab keeps prototyping. Japanese fashion's great optimist: where his peers wielded black, Miyake pleated joy.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Pleats Please and Bao Bao bags
Made in Japan
More in Tokyo
- ozie — Tokyo
- A Bathing Ape (BAPE) — Tokyo
- Akihabara — Tokyo
- Ameyoko — Tokyo
- Anatomica — Tokyo
- and Wander — Tokyo
- At Last & Co — Tokyo
- Auralee — Tokyo
Where next
- Beams Plus — Tokyo
- Elie Saab — Paris
- Free’p’Star — Paris
Hand-curated for ORBIS · no paid placement