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For more than 30 years Japanese fashion designer
Issey Miyake has brought together art and
haute couture. He collaborated with contemporary artists, exhibited at
museums or created costumes for
Frankfurt Ballet. In his New York
Headquarter, which was designed by famous architect
Frank Gehry, Miyake still proves to be an innovator for art and fashion,
using the talents of
Naoki Takizawa as his successor in designing and directing the company's
fashion shows. Takizawa caused sensation by his collaboration with
Japanese artist
Takashi Murakami. Cheryl Kaplan looks at the happy marriage between
art and fashion at "TriBeCa Issey Miyake".
Inside the Issey Miyake Store
with
display by Chiho Aoshima,
New
York, 2004, Photo: Chiho Aoshima
While the
culture of cute has nearly turned Tokyo into an "adult kiddy land,"
finding girls and young women way past their infancy wearing clothing
suited to five year-olds, Japan's history of super-chic fashion thrives
with designers such as Issey Miyake and Naoki Takizawa, the design prodigy
of Miyake International's men's and women's collections. Mixing in the
company of artists has always been a specialty of Issey Miyake's, who
started his company,
Miyake Design Studio, in 1970, creating the tattoo dress inspired by
Jimi Hendrix and
Janis Joplin, who had both died that year. He looked at the tattoo as an
homage, but it was also an homage that linked pop culture and art with
fashion. Only a few years earlier, Miyake had trained at
Givenchy in Paris, where he did sketches that were often sent to
Audrey Hepburn and the
Duchess of Windsor for their consent. Early on, Miyake's collaborations
with the art world landed him on the cover of
artforum, attracting special super-star attention by art world fans at a
time when SoHo still meant art. Miyake's cutting-edge technology was
speeding ahead, changing the very nature of how couture was manufactured,
designed, and bought.
Issey Miyake
Miyake has worked with
photographers, artists, and dancers (including
William Forsythe of the Frankfurt Ballet) as well as filmmakers and
architects. These collaborations have always "felt natural" to the
designer. Former Frankfurt Ballet dancer
Helen Pickett recalls "lots and lots of boxes arriving before the
performance of Forsythe's 1991 ballet
Loss of small detail." The costumes, numbering close to 300, also marked
the debut of the Pleats Please
collection. Miyake and Naoki watched the Frankfurt Ballet rehearsals in the
wings, never interfering, but constantly observing. Pickett notes: "Miyake
also invited several of the dancers to appear in fashion runway shows in
Japan and Paris. And we did special performances." All this may have also
been due to the fact that as a boy growing up in Hiroshima, Miyake wanted
to be a dancer. Miyake, after all, is a designer who has gone out of his
way not to design according to the strictures of his
Guy LaRoche and
Geoffrey Beene past, though he's still indebted to the fashion designer
Vionnet. Miyake has said: "I never wanted to be a designer's designer. I
just wanted to feel on a par with other creative people like
Christo or John
Cage, to not be too much in fashion." His collections are deeply
dramatic and probably much closer to
performance art and
happenings than to the convention of the runway. The start probably
happened during university. Miyake notes: "I used to get magazines from
America with photographs by people like
Avedon and
Hiro, and saw art by people like
Andy Warhol."
Rauschenberg was also a big influence and changed the way Miyake perceived
art and fashion.
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Irving Penn's photographies of Issey
Miyake's women's-collection.
Photo: Irving Penn (c) Issey Miyake in collaboration with Irving Penn
Miyake's mostly intuitive collaborations have literally been unspoken, as in
his now-famous collaboration with
Irving Penn that began in 1986 with a "voiceless message" sent back and
forth, known in Japanese as A-un. When Miyake approached Penn, the only
thing he wanted was for Penn to help him find what he should do next as a
designer. Miyake never went to Penn's studio, nor Penn to Miyake's runway
or showroom, although he did send the photographer clothing and a stylist.
One imagines the silence of a note being passed without reference to its
author and then returned until the project is completed. The result was a
series of six books and an exhibition at the
Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Miyake, in fact, has exhibited in
the world's major museums, including
SFMoCA and Fondation Cartier
. His only outwardly directed collaborative invitation to artists was in
association with the
Cartier exhibition, for which he asked artists
Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki
, Tim Hawkinson,
and
Cai Guo-Qiang to participate in his Guest Artist Series in 1996. A
spokesperson for Issey Miyake explained: "What each artist did for
Pleats Please was not collaborative in the sense that they didn't sit
down and work with Issey, but they were given pleats to work with as a
kind of canvas for their own work. The artist designed it, and Miyake
implemented the concept. Issey didn't view the collaborations as a
commercial endeavor, but rather as an experiment and a way to expand what
he was doing conceptually as a designer."
Dress from the Guest Artist Series, 1996
(c) 1997 Issey Miyake and Yasumasa Morimura
The
expansion began with Morimura's restaging of
Ingres, in which he combined the famous Ingres
image of a concubine with an inverted
color photo of himself, where his head and body were draped in a red veil
and his hands clasped. An eerie image that found the guest embedded into
the form. The Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang began his project with a
trail of white Miyake pleated garments set on the gallery floor in the
shape of a dragon. He then doused gunpowder across the dragon and ignited
it. The remaining image was left as sculpture, but also echoed an exploded
pattern used later as the basis for a pleated dress.
A Piece of Cloth, Installation, 1999 Foto: (c) Issey Miyake
Miyake has recently centralized his operations.
TriBeCa Issey Miyake in New York is the worldwide flagship store and
site for Miyake's U.S. headquarters, housing a store, showroom, and
offices.
Frank Gehry's sculptural intervention and store design for TriBeCa
encompasses the complete Miyake collections for the first time. This
includes Issey Miyake by Naoki Takizawa, the
A-POC line, Pleats Please, and MeIssey Miyake. The space
has already debuted art exhibitions by painter
Sebastian Blanck, photographer Cary Wollensky, and artist Ian Wright, as
well as the
spring/summer 2004 premiere of a limited-edition pleated silk T-shirt
series by artist Tsuyoshi
Hirano and his wall mural. The Hirano series has been created under
Naoki Takizawa's guidance.
While the Hirano T-shirts still bear the
convention of applied design, a twist that's closer to home on the art
front can be found between Naoki Takizawa at Issey Miyake International
and Takashi Murakami. This intersection of contemporary Japanese art and
contemporary Japanese design has been a much-anticipated linchpin. No one
has used this leverage point better than Murakami, who launched his trail
of fashion conquests with the Miyake relationship. Murakami's recent
collaboration with Marc
Jacobs at Louis Vuitton,
however, was of a completely different nature.
Harold Koda, director and curator of the Costume Institute at the
Met, describes it thus: "what happens when an artist overlays their work
onto a form predicated by a designer is that they're decorating. It's no
longer their art. With Vuitton, it's Murakami's palette, but not his
pattern."
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