Miyake Modern - Japanese designer Issey Miyake - Interview

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Joan Simon

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

Curiosity and collaboration have characterized Issey Miyake's process and productions from his student days at Tama Art University, Tokyo, to his current show at the Fondation Cartier, Paris. The way he put it in 1963, when he first showed his designs in a multimedia theatrical event called "A Poem in Cloth and Stone," still seems pertinent: "We want to stimulate the imagination through clothing."

"Making Things" is not a retrospective of Miyake's almost 30-year career, though it certainly triggers interest in seeing a comprehensive study. Rather, it is an on-site exploration and presentation of the way things can be made and remade, seen through Miyake's selection of clothes from the past 10 years. The show 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 steel and glass geometries make for strong 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 one of the two ground-floor galleries can be seen from streetside, through 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 ends of wires, set into motion at different paces and in different directions by motors, which cause them to ascend and descend, whirl, jerk and inflate, like marionettes. The clothes trap air currents as they move, as well as during their moments at rest. Miyake's forms are often 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 Dress (Spring/Summer 1994) seem quite at home in this Paris habitat where nature is on view beyond the glass walls. (This urban wilderness is itself a Cartier-commissioned work by Lothar Baumgarten.) Others, such as Flying Saucer (Spring/Summer 1994) or Minaret (Spring/Summer 1995), float like paper lanterns.

The "Jumping" garments are controlled by electronic sensors that start up the action in response to the movements of gallery visitors. Subtly collaborative with the audience, this innovative system keeps changing the installation's tempo, while also echoing the energy conservation practice of the French system of minuterie (where a light is turned on in a semi-public space, such as in an apartment building's entry hall, only at the time of use, and after a few 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 style, 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 body have become as synonymous with his name as, in the early years of the century, such pleating was linked with Mario Fortuny's.

Miyake chose collaborators who use the body in their own works as an erotic or conceptual entity. In some ways, the structure of the pleated cloth offers a work surface more like a fan, or the folded paper of the Surrealists' cadavre exquis drawings, than a page for receiving the imprint of an image. The Surrealist fondness for body and clothing fragments, dolls and mannequins seems shared by Miyake's artist collaborations, as is perhaps to be expected given the dislocation of scale that occurs when images of a body are inscribed on another body. Hawkinson's magnified dolls' eyes (from Eye Globe, 1992) printed on the Miyake dresses present the most extreme scale discrepancy.

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

Morimura's dresses are imprinted with a photo image of a standing female nude 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 nude torso draped in a red net veil, and his hands clasped as if in prayer.