Miyake, whose name became a byword for Japan’s economy and fashion in the 1980s, died on Aug. 5 of liver cancer, Kyodo news agency reported. No further details were immediately available. Miyake is said to have wanted to be either a dancer or an athlete before reading his sister’s fashion magazines inspired him to change direction – with those initial interests thought to be behind the freedom of movement the clothes allow him. Miyake was born in Hiroshima and was seven years old when the atomic bomb fell on the city while he was in a classroom. He was reluctant to talk about the event in later life. In 2009, writing in the New York Times as part of a campaign to get then-US President Barack Obama to visit the city, he said he did not want to be labeled “the designer who survived”. “When I close my eyes, I still see things that no one should ever have to experience,” he wrote, adding that within three years his mother died from radiation exposure. “I tried, though unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward fashion design, in part because it’s a creative form that’s modern and upbeat.” After studying graphic design at a Tokyo art university, he studied fashion design in Paris, where he worked with famous fashion designers Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy, before heading to New York. In 1970, he returned to Tokyo and founded the Miyake Design Studio. In the late 1980s he developed a new way of pleating by wrapping fabrics between layers of paper and placing them in a heat press, with the garments retaining their pleated shape. Tested for their freedom of movement on dancers, this led to the development of the signature Pleats, Please line. Models show off creations from Issey Miyake’s spring/summer 2023 menswear collection during Paris Fashion Week in June. Photo: Mohammed Badra/EPA She developed more than a dozen fashion lines ranging from mainstream Issey Miyake for men and women to handbags, watches and fragrances before essentially retiring in 1997 to devote herself to research. In 2016, when asked what he thought were the challenges facing future designers, he said that people were likely to consume less. “We may have to go through a dilution process. This is important,” he was quoted as saying. “In Paris, we call people who make clothes couturiers – they develop new clothes – but really the job of design is to make something that works in real life.”
