Issey Miyake

After surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a child, Miyake turned to clothes as a modern, optimistic form of creativity, and revived the use of ...

And the first 15 years of his atelier's production is captured in a lavishly cool monograph, Issey Miyake & Miyake Design Studio 1970-1985 (Works Words Years) (1985). A landmark retrospective of his workwas held at the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2016, covering 45 years of his design work. As well as the Met, his clothes are held by insitutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Denver Art Museum, where pieces by Miyake and Yamamoto are hung alongside Japanese traditional garments. Miyake handed over the running of his business, which had expanded into fragrances—including L'eau d'Issey—and other merchandise, to others in 1997, to focus on research into new fabrics and production techniques, fuelled by his interest in the connection between technology and creativity. In 2009, Miyake, who had long been reluctant to be labelled "the designer who survived the atomic bomb", wrote a powerful op-ed articleon his experience for the New York Times, in which he encouraged then-US president Barack Obama to visit the city to demonstrate his commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. Miyake made another kind of headline when he supplied what became a trademark polyester-cotton turtleneck to the co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, a piece of clothing that became as much of a brand marker for the biggest tech company in the world as the bitten-apple logo and the curve of a corner on the iPhone. On a trip to Japan in the 1980s, Jobs had admired the practical chic of the grey uniforms worn by Sony workers, and that company's chief, Akio Morita, told him that Miyake had designed them. But Miyake, who did not care for the cost and impracticality of haute couture, brought this side of his work to the high street in 1993 with his Pleats Please clothes—now collectors' items—where heat-treated polyester was used to create genuinely unisex, permanently pleated, free-flowing, one-size-fits-all garments.