Miyake Modern - Japanese designer Issey Miyake - Interview

Issey Miyake's innovative clothing, in fabrics that range from handmade and natural to space-age synthetic, is generally featured at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The 10-year contemplate highlights this Japanese designer's extensive collaborations with visual artists.

Curiosity and collaboration have characterized Issey Miyake's proces and productions from his learner days at Tama Art University, Tokyo, to his popular show at the Fondation Cartier, Paris. The way he bring it in 1963, when he first showed his designs in a multimedia theatrical incident called "A Poem in woven fabric and Stone," still seems pertinent: "We want to stimulate the imagination [i]or[/i] part of to the other clothing."

"Making Things" is not a retrospective of Miyake's almost 30-year career, although it certainly triggers interest in seeing a comprehensive inquiry Rather, it is an on-site exploration and presentation of the way things can be made and remade, seen [i]or[/i] part of to the other Miyake's selection of clothes from the past 10 years. The exhibit reveals his collaborations with artists, dancers, photographers, textile designers and installation technicians; with technology and with the consumer; and overall with the architecture of Jean Nouvel's Cartier building, whose carbonized iron and glass geometries make for lusty lines as well as a lightness of being that is not unlike the structural spirit of Miyake's clothes.

Miyake's mechanically animated installation "Jumping" in single of the two ground-floor galleries can be seen from streetside, end the museum's transparent glass facade, as can his "Pleats Please" guest-artist collaborations in the other. The "Jumping" clothes are suspended from the ceiling at the extremitys of wires, set into motion at different paces and in different directions through motors, which cause them to ascend and come down whirl, jerk and inflate, like marionettes. The clothes trap air commons as they move, as well as during their point of times at rest. Miyake's forms are many times inspired by nature, and titled accordingly: Mantis (Autumn/Winter 1989) Escargot (Spring/Summer 1990) Tidal Wave (Autumn/Winter 1992) or Shell (Autumn/Winter 1994) for example. The veining and leaf-weight delicacy of Bouncing Dres (Spring/Summer 1994) appear to be quite at home in this Paris habitat where nature is upon view beyond the glass walls. (This urban wilderness is itself a Cartier-commissioned work by the agency of Lothar Baumgarten.) Others, such as Flying Saucer (Spring/Summer 1994) or Minaret (Spring/Summer 1995) float like paper lanterns.

The "Jumping" garments are controll by the agency of electronic sensors that start up the action in replication to the movements of gallery visitors. Subtly collaborative with the audience, this innovative combination of parts to form a whole keeps changing the installation's time while also echoing the efficiency conservation practice of the French a whole of minuterie (where a light is turn rounded on in a semi-public space, similar as in an apartment building's ingress hall, only at the time of use, and after a not many minutes automatically turns itself off) The themes of minimizing waste in clothing fabrication and of reusing clothes are overtly addressed in the show's "Laboratory" section.

Affixed to the glass walls, salon phraseology the artists' collaborations on Miyake's Pleats Please line--by Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang--convert the museum's expansive clear walls to stained-glass windows. While the line of pleated basics was introduced in 1993 it was in 1996 that Miyake invited artists to use the modular pleated garments as a medium for printed imagery. Tightly packed narrow pleats that allow fabric to flexibly conform to the wearer's material part have become as synonymous with his name as, in the early years of the hundred such pleating was linked with Mario Fortuny's.

Miyake chose collaborators who use the material substance in their own works as an erotic or conceptual entity. In a certain quantity of ways, the structure of the pleated woven fabric offers a work surface more like a fan, or the enclosureed paper of the Surrealists' cadavre exquis drawings, than a page for receiving the imprint of an image. The Surrealist fondnes for material part and clothing fragments, dolls and mannequins appear to bes shared by Miyake's artist collaborations, as is perhaps to be wait fored given the dislocation of scale that appears when images of a material substance are inscribed on another material part Hawkinson's magnified dolls' eyes (from organ of sight Globe, 1992) printed on the Miyake dresse not away the most extreme scale discrepancy.

Elsewhere, Araki's erotic photographs of women play upon and within the folded fabric makes For his "Appear" series, the image was printed upon the clothing before it was pleated; for "Disappear," afterwards. Thus the photo images advance in and out of focus, thus to speak, as the clothing tread on the heels ofs the wearer's movements.

Morimura's dresse are imprinted with a photo image of a standing female denuded from a painting by Ingres, The Source; merging with the Ingres image is a superimposed, inverted color-photo image of Morimura, his tipped head and in a state of nature torso draped in a r trap veil, and his hands clasped as if in prayer.