Writing over email from Tokyo after we missed our Zoom window because Coperni decided to have its could-have-been-in-any-big-room show way beyond the Paris périphérique (like, why?), Issey Miyake’s designer Satoshi Kondo reported: “Through this collection, I want to focus on the beauty of nature, and discover the untamed nature of a growing plant, including its roots growing in all directions, the stems growing from the ground into the sunlight. I wanted to create a collection that is lively, and to feel like the garments are alive and growing through their color, silhouette, and textures. The colors of this collection were created through natural colors of fruits and vegetables. The design team took real fruits and vegetables (i.e., beets, kiwis, oranges) and created juices to be inspired by their beautiful colors to create the color palette of this collection.”
Entitled Sow It and Let It Grow, this collection’s Yuichi Kodama–directed video did indeed present its outfits and models as fast-flourishing seedlings that sped from horizontal germination to wending growth up a spiral staircase: They were then digitally replicated as they spread across a trellis of elevated walkways. Subsoil monochrome dresses and separates featured irregularly contoured panels of plissé recycled polyester yarn shaped to echo the thrusting chaos of root systems. Flatly foldable seamless knit pieces in a series named Rhizome included frond-like extraneous sleeves for leaving loose or wrapping around the body like a sun-seeking jasmine plant. Tie-dyed dresses created in pods of pleating connected by Kyoto artisans using the shiborizome technique were meant to resemble pea pods. Dye prints of sliced fruit pieces decorated three styles of suit and dress on cotton cupro.
Less literally botanical were the garment-dyed brown and pink dresses whose bulbous shapes were achieved by sewing in circular panels of elastic that then shrunk and tautened during the dyeing. Coats in layered wool and cotton were patterned to abstractly mirror plant growth, and a closing trio of looks in rectangular panels of material attached with typical Miyake ingenuity were gently leaflike. This was a collection of finely pruned foliage that would be a pleasure to cultivate through the wearing.
