Visual fashion from Issey Miyake

OWN THOUGHT / RESEARCH 

During the week 9, I found interactive and Issey Miyake's promotion are always crossing over each other. All of the promotions are different way such as dancing, exhibition, fashion show...

This research about how Issey Miyake express the cloths for promoting.

what is "Visual fashion" for him?

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Issey Miyake bodys work Learning Issey Miyake "Pleats"

His profound interest in the body, and in the complementary and yet oppositional relationship existing between body and clothes. In their edition, Ingrid Sischy and Germano Celant raised an important question; Why does a work enter the popular domain and how does it come even to influence the life of the street? About Miyake's works in particular they added, "The bodice and skirt on the cover and the jacket by Issey Miyake shown here represent this Modern convergence of signs. Equivalences are created between carving and modeling, between rigidity and softness, between the natural and the painted over, between representation and showing. The outfit is a charged mnemonic device representing event and cumulative information. The elements of fashion, of course, are there. So is the kind of dialogue with past and future, with the situation of the individual within a technocracy, that characterizes the mass-oriented avant-garde.'

In July 1980, at the time of the Venice Biennale(whose theme was "The Presence of the Past", the Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi organized an international debate about post modernism. This movement, which had grown up at the end of the 60s, gave expression to a moment of serious doubt in contemporary consciousness and corresponded to what Jean-Francois Leotard, in the Post modernism Condition(1970), called "in-credulity" in the face of the philosophical and political "grand narratives". This set of ideas led architectures, artists, designers and musicians to collaborate with each there. "Architecture became closer to fashion and vice-versa". "I don't really like post modernism", says Miyake, "but I think it is important because it has caused traditional opinions to change. A new dynamic was necessary. At the same time, post modernism ended up becoming a sort of fad and I have a general hatred for everything faddish. But of course I think that postmodernism, insofar as it led to a greater openness, was an interesting experience."

During this period of the 80s, Miyake put on town major exhibitions; Issey Miyake Spectacle Bodyworks and Issey Miyake A-UN. It was created expression of the research that Miyake was conducting into the plasticity of the body, and presented clothes made from materials which had been inconceivable until that point. The mise-se-scene of this exhibition emphasized the imagine of the strong, beautiful woman who had escaped the past and was resolutely facing the future. 

"Pleats move and change form with the wearer's body movements. As the pleats move they change colors, giving an optical illusion like a kaleidoscope", he explained, "Pleats contain endless fascination for me and also inspire a multitude of images." Unlike the conventional method of pleating pollster with heat and then cutting the fabric to a design, Miyake reversed the process by designing the shape first and pleating the finished form.

The pleating press became the experimental focus as comparisons of different fabric composition, including the use of wool, linen and cotton, were tasted alongside variations in color and tone of cloth. The initial graphic effect was of horizontal and vertical lines, but by turing the unpleased garment and feeding it into the pleating machines at an angle, diagonally pleated clothes were produced. As well as providing elasticity for the wearer, the pleats provided a constantly shifting play of light, heightening Miyake's sense of the surface of the cloth.

I found a beautiful movie of pleat movement. From this I can see, how much Pleat and movement effect each other. By movement, the colour change, the shape change.

The texts in Miyake's book Issey Miyake bodyworks(1983), one is impressed not only by the diversity of the commentators, from artists, designers, philosophers, sociologists and models to Miyake himself, but by the recurring statements of freedom that his clothes encourage. The freedom may have come from the "masks" which one commentator believed the clothes provided in the same manner as body decoration might determine the confidence and the role of the Nuba warrior. In addition to the psychological freedom came the freedom of the body at ease with its movement, or of the body unharnessed in its "second skin".

There are two meanings that we had in mind for this show. The first is a reflection on the way that design and fashion appear in advertising photographs; the other is an attempt to capture the way fashion is presented in magazines. That's why we have planned a collection that is viewed through the lens of a camera. The ideas behind this show is totally different from the objective we habitually havethta's to say, presenting clothes that have been made to be worn. Moreover, in Japan, the distinction between "fashion" and "trend" is very vague, so this show also aims to clearly define them both. "Fashion" refers to original works each having an intrinsic value.From this are born popular styles, those of the street, which we call "trends". These two concepts have a complementary relationship and are in fact two faces of the same thing. Since it is these two concepts which shape the future, the role of the designer is to create fashion and then to help it trickle down onto the street." Aged twenty-five when Miyake gave this definition, the word "trend" had not yet become hackneyed in Japan. It allowed him to free himself from the burden of the fashion world, and from its commercial objectives implicated, and to position himself as a designer with his own creative concepts.

Memo (Meeting people)

Miyake has an unending interest in people, and most of his encounters have been decisive for his work. Be the person famous or not, it is his or her way of living and thinking that matters since works of art only exist by virtue of the will of a man or woman.

"I learn an enormous from the way people behave. One can never draw energy from inside a work of art once it is complete. For example, when I was working with Irving Penn I discovered at the same time both how little strength I had and, when I saw my works reproduced by means of the camera lens, how I could find it. My encounter with Shiri Kuramata was also very exciting for me and had an important influence on my work for the collection Bodyworks. In the same way, Lucie Rie, Ettore Sottsass, Tadao Ando, Isamu Noguchi, William Forsythe and the past Shunter Tanikawa are all artists who have given me some intangible, but essential, thing. My meetings with such people have played a cardinal role for me. To be in contact with the thinking which has given rise to a work of art, and to collaborate with artists, unleashes my energy. This is the thinking that gave birth to the Guest Artist Series."

Poem(Shunter Tanikawa)

Everything is Soft

A square is sometimes shy

and softly slips into roundness.

In roundness it feels nine

and ever so easily dozes off.

"Upright", unawares, wavers into the wrinkling of age.

Getting old is a good feeling.

"Upright" smiles in silence.

Even a triangle and diamond 

want to take on favorite shapes.

Like water or wind, they want to expand or shrink,

and lean on someone.

And colors, you know-

they play hide and seek, and tag

with flowers, leaves, mud and the sea 

and make up a lot of stories."

References

Issey Miyake 391.092 MIY

Issey Miyake Making things 391.092 MIY

Pleats Pleats Issey Miyake 391.092 MIY