JAPAN. Tokyo: Issey Miyake, a Japanese fashion designer with a career that spanned more than 50 years around the world, passed away on Tuesday at 84.
A source close to the designer stated that there were no plans for a public celebration and that Miyake’s funeral had already taken place with “just relatives participating” as per his desires.
His death was reported by the Japanese public broadcaster NHK and other media, with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and other sources stating that he had passed away from liver cancer.
Young Japanese designers made their impact in Paris starting in the middle of the 1970s, including Miyake, who invented high-tech, comfy apparel.
Miyake received praise from the French fashion federation on Tuesday, noting that “he was the first international designer to appear at Paris Fashion Week in April 1974.”
According to Bruno Pavlovsky, president of the Federation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, Miyake “contributed, with steadfast dedication, to the influence of Paris Fashion Week from its foundation.”
The fashion house of Miyake was renowned for its avant-garde and extravagant catwalk displays and for cultivating many gifted new designers.
The company made its live comeback at Paris Fashion Week in June with a men’s show starring models, dancers, and acrobats, after two years of exhibiting collections online or with installations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He was seven when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. He was born in Hiroshima in 1938. Miyake survived the explosion, which, together with the bombing of Nagasaki three days later, caused an estimated 140,000 deaths immediately upon impact and ultimately ended World War II.
In 2009, Miyake penned an article for the New York Times stating, “I have never decided to share my memories or feelings of that day. I’ve made an effort—albeit in vain—to put them in the past and instead focus on things that can be built, not destroyed, and that provide happiness and beauty.
The fashion designer attended a Tokyo art school before relocating to Paris in 1965 to enrol at the prestigious Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.”
In 1970, he founded the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo and, shortly after that, his first store in Paris. His career was well underway by the 1980s when he worked with various materials, including plastic, metal wire, and even handmade Japanese paper.
The “Pleats Please” line of permanently pleated goods that do not crease, the futuristic triangles of his “Bao Bao” bag, and his “A-POC (A Piece Of Cloth)” concept, which involved utilising computers to cut entire outfits without seams, were among his creations.
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