Under the green girder glass roof of the Lycée Carnot, Issey Miyake’s models at first emerged in twos. Side by side, each pair approached the photographers before splitting to head to tangential corners of the room, continuing on a crisscrossed path of back-and-forth triangles whose significance became clear later. Once a few sets of looks were out from backstage, the two courts in front of us were a jumble of precisely moving young women who looked like they were practicing an extremely stately and very complicated football play.
Singer-songwriter Hiroko Sebu played her Korg and sang to the accompaniment of a Miyake-panted fellow on a drum synthesizer. The first few looks were pairs wearing coats and skirts in “Dough Dough,” the house’s proprietorial sculpt-able fabric. Possibly the first pair and the second pair (albeit here in different colors) were presentations of the same garments sculpted in different shapes to show their adaptability. Then came a coat and a dress in a gray-on-gray sort of fifth-generation Doctor Who Tardis-interior pattern (I was a junior Whovian) nubble knit. Later, there were a series of looks in Miyake’s signature springy accordion folds whose monochrome pattern resembled the keys on Sebu’s synth, but jumbled and distorted in size and perspective.
Miyake’s famous and much-counterfeited triangle panel Bao Bao bag material was adapted and lightened into what looked like synthetic fabric, gently heat-pressed with a triangular grid (hence, perhaps, that interlinking equilateral runway routing). In navy, black, or white suits or various increasingly sunny multicolor and volumized looks—sometimes in slightly mundane shapes—these moved irresistibly against the eye. There were two long dresses in framed panels of multicolor technical pleating that bounced around like a Slinky on a steep stairwell as their models crisscrossed the courts, back and forth, back and forth.
