Yoshiyuki Miyamae may be nuts about nuts. That was one takeaway from this season’s Issey Miyake outing, where Miyamae, the brand’s food-obsessed designer, turned his attention to the beauty of seeds, beans, and pulses. There was a figurative element to the reference: The big Issey Miyake retrospective recently on view at The National Art Center Tokyo got Miyamae thinking about the first principles of the label—the sprout from which it all sprung, as it were. That idea was then literalized via textures, shapes, colors, and prints that winked at roasted almonds, pistachios, coffee beans, and more.
In a few instances, the theme read very clearly. It was unmistakable in coffee bean and pistachio prints, and legible in the variety of rounded silhouettes and textures, like that of a cocoonish cream-color coat paneled in strips of frayed linen that mimicked the hand of a ribbed almond shell. There was also something of the ovoid smoothness of a pale almond sliver in this collection’s best new trouser silhouette, a pair of harem-ish pants with a side-belted drape across the front.
This being an Issey Miyake collection, much of the interest was in the textiles. Miyamae and his team continue to refine the algorithms underlying their Baked Stretch and 3-D Steam Stretch technologies, and this season they put them to use to create tonal print effects out of variegated texture, and to punch up the vibrancy of brilliant graphic prints by making them three-dimensional. Those graphic prints were not inspired by nuts. Rather, these accessible looks drew on African textiles, giving tribal aesthetics a digital-age update. One of Miyamae’s cleverest executions was to bond the patterned fabric to a tan wool blend, and cut trench-inspired coats and jackets that revealed bright patterns here and there and—if you looked
closely—showed the shadow of the same pattern underneath the tan. Most people, when they think Issey Miyake, instantly think pleats; Miyamae has lots of intriguing ideas where pleats are concerned, but he puts his creativity to work on other kinds of looks, too.
