Stop playing with your food! Were you ever a child? Then at some point, most likely many times, you heard this from your parents. It is a time-honored mantra that Issey Miyake creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae ignored with gusto this season. Miyamae had his mind on the cosmos this time out, but rather than get the point across by licensing images from NASA (expensive, surely), he created his various galactic prints by means of gelatin, whipped cream, and pancakes. That’s more of a fun fact than anything a customer would need to know to appreciate these clothes, but Miyamae’s methods do get to the heart of the Issey Miyake brand’s enduring appeal: It’s fusion of the space-age and the handmade.
These Miyake looks were high-tech, to be sure. There was a fabulous variety of pleat techniques, everything from spiraling pleats created via heat-sensitive thread and the application of intense amounts of steam to a puckered check, reminiscent of quilting in its visual effect, that used the same thread and the same steam to actually tailor coats according to an algorithm woven into the underlying material. It’s easy to get swept up in the engineering of these garments, and lose sight of the fact that Miyamae and his team put their science in the service of creating more or less accessible looks, ones that sometimes flaunt a flair for the sculpturally dramatic. The drama was in full effect in this collection’s orb-shaped dresses and tops, but it was also evinced in vaguely kimono-ish looks in a deep red jacquard, its mottled, Mars-inspired pattern created not with food but by a traditional Japanese marbling technique called suminagashi. The sense of hand was palpable here; rough edges and little imperfections seemed to have been reckoned in as part of the algorithm. That’s what keeps the Miyake aesthetic—clinical though it may be—from feeling cold.
