Today, this house unlike any other relocated to a venue unlike any other: La salle des fêtes in Paris’s seat of political power, the Hôtel de Ville. Way above us in the balcony, you could see the silhouette of musician Ei Wada. He began to throw some shapes, deeply geekily, while he wah-wahed audio signals against each other just as the the first looks in a collection themed around the Northern Lights shimmered down the parquet runway.
Miyake is lovable for many reasons—for most people, the clothes. Reviewers, however, love it for the press notes that divide each collection into suites defined with clinical rhetoric—they leave the adjectives to us—according to fabrication. So today, the first suite of looks 1 to 10) was called Auroral and fittingly incorporated Shetland wool dyed five colors and combed into five threads. The idea was that the yarn changed color according to the point of view of the observer. This was hard to see, however, and it was not until glimpsing an un-shiny purple woolen cloak and a similarly fabricated short-sleeved hoodie and pant that one began to see the lightness of being a Miyake-wearer.
The second suite of looks—a two-parter running from 12 to 18 and 23 to 27—was called Plasma x Baked Stretch. It came after a sadly undescribed section of wide but finely divided sectional wool looks that were rather lovely (and unusual for Miyake in their chunkiness). The precise detail of how the glue-printed fabrics had been rendered into grids of purple on blue and burgundy on green that adopted a decorative structural integrity as logical but lustrous as that of the Palladian bling chamber around us was too much to take in along with the clothes themselves.
The long closing section—Auroras x Steam Stretch—came with its own diagram to communicate how team Miyake had fashioned fabric that emanated in grids of concentric wavy lines from one central point, and which sprung up like a finely calibrated suspension system on the off beat of the wearer’s every step. This fabric was fantastic, yet sometimes the final silhouette into which it was fashioned was a little pantomime Peter Pan–meets–woodland fairy. Not that the many who love Miyake for its clothes more than its wondrous notes will much mind.
