The blue-and-white gridded triangular accordion of a dress that came out as Look 23 was the heart of this free-spirited and fascinating Issey Miyake show. In the show notes, Miyake described its “Cut & Stick” fabrication, which involves “sticking together two different materials—a soft, fluid jersey fabric and a stiff fabric—[which] creates a rigid yet flexible texture.” That construction made the dress bounce up on the off beat of the model’s walk. It was like watching a spring coil down a flight of stairs.
The collection started with a close examination of irregular trapezoid shapes on plain backgrounds, then panned back to create multiple patterns, then zoomed in again to the finale. Against a backdrop of four synthesized kazoo players and a synth accompanist playing what sounded like a segue on the Superman theme song, it was all a bit much. You had to stretch your mind in tandem with the fabric to get the point. The grids at the heart of the collection reminded me of the spiritual geography of Australian aboriginal painting—the biological topography of repetition and dreaming as imaginarily seen from above. The invitation’s image of a pattern softly imposed on a plowed midsummer cornfield reinforced this. Some of the colors were brash—even trite—and the purposeful naïveté of the opening and closing sections was, although sophisticated and planned as a counterpoint, still what it was. But the heart at the middle of this show pumped and intrigued as assuredly as the Sony-developed electronic paper handbags that pulsed with changing color in the models’ hands.
