I first met Issey Miyake in 1973 during his first prêt-à-porter runway show. I was struck by the clarity and coherence of his lines. Fresh and different to all the other collections seen up until then. The diverse use of colour and the elements of Japanese culture and tradition were clearly present. His way of cutting and assembling the fabric was completely the opposite of our western tradition. He’d experimented over time with highly advanced materials. After graduating from Tama Art University in Tokyo, he’d spent several years of apprenticeship in Paris with Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy, then later when he moved to New York, with Geoffrey Beene. He returned to Tokyo in 1970 with the idea of creating a fashion all of his own. At university he’d studied graphic design which turned him towards an innovative, contemporary style, unbeholden to the usual flights of fancy. He thought that the dress should be conceived according to the same principles with which design renews objects, buildings and everything that industry produces. A tough project to realise in the fashion world. An anarchic universe where the imagination of the individual reigns, uncoupled from any other reference. Miyake was able to enter fashion successfully merging the design element with the essence and rationale of Japanese culture. He focused on research and discovered technological innovations for treating and transforming fabrics or for enhancing their performance. He invented a garment which at the same time valorised the elegance, the refinement and the grace required by the dress. In short, a miracle. In fact, a double miracle if you add that the dresses by Miyake are not only entirely novel with never seen before features, but which also perfectly enhanced the personality of whoever wore them, to the point of always being actual and timeless. A dress by Miyake does not go out of fashion, even after many years. Whoever buys one, knows that. In Dubai we have an English artist friend who has lived there for thirty years, does shows, projects for the Royal Family, and teaches at the university. She proudly wears Miyake, always, and regardless of when it was made. She’s called Patricia Millns and everyone knows her for her intimist art and her installations which mix the two cultures, often with textile elements and even actual garments, but also because she’s a strict vegan, and for her uniquely diverse elegance. She has a huge personality. With her waif like figure, her intelligent face sculpted with the lines of time, and dressed in Miyake, she is fascinating and quite beautiful. Miyake was born in Hiroshima, the city where the atomic bomb exploded, and he too suffered the consequences. Still today Issey  limps slightly. Two hundred thousand people died. He saved himself. He was only seven years old and his mother died seven years later having developed osteomyelitis. Destiny carried him not only to Paris, but to the heights of fashion around the world. With his fatalism he became so much more than just a designer. Perhaps a philosopher. A guru. And an artist. A visit to his boutique in Place des Vosges was an obligatory stop for us during the French fashion shows. Issey waited for us in his shop, simple and available, and we spent memorable times chatting about fashion and life. Years ago Gisella and I went to visit him in Tokyo where he’d opened Miyake Design Studio in 1970. An ambient in which you could understand how collections could be conceived and defined as monastic and mysterious. A great space for research, with avant-garde machinery using innovative technology to create his dresses from natural and synthetic fabrics, and even from paper. Many in polyester and other artificial fibres. There emerged fabric with waves, creased or pleated with tiny close folds, relief surfaces, laser cut lace, and other rigorously unpredictable inventions. The fruits of continuous experimentation finalized to express his refined, simple, graphic taste. His masterpiece-turned-brand, used in a thousand forms, is “pleats please”, was based on forms obtained from crease resistant immutable pleated material, capable of transforming from a dress-sculpture fit for a grand soirée, to a minimalist sheath dress or all manner of accessories. 

I thought of him when I published Dress-Art the first book on my work as an artist: he gifted me a precious comment which underlines our friendship and closeness, with fashion as our accomplice.