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Designer Issey Miyake, known in the fashion world as the prince of wrinkles and for his innovative tailoring and bold style, has died of cancer. He was 84.
His studio, Miyake Design Office, announced Tuesday that he died of liver cancer on Aug. 5, according to the Associated Press.
The pioneering designer, who rose to stardom shortly after founding his studio in the 1970s, was best known for his origami-style pleated clothing that never creases and for making Apple founder Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck sweaters .
Japan’s public media organization NHK reported that a family funeral has taken place and that there will be no further public events, in line with Miyake’s wishes.
Miyake always stayed true to his “core design style — creating clothes from original materials, beginning with the search for a single thread,” a technique that “lasted for generations” and “broke the boundaries between East and West,” according to his studio’s website .
His attire was not form-fitting like his Western counterparts, as he championed freedom of movement and paid particular attention to each piece of fabric to begin his elegant designs. They were often made with minimal decoration and detail in curved shapes and block colors.
“To me, clothes shouldn’t be things that confine or enclose the body…clothes should set you free,” Miyake said in a 1998 Washington lecture. “Maybe I make tools. People buy the clothes, and the clothes become the tools for the wearer’s creativity,” he added.
His designs have been worn by a variety of celebrities and exhibited in museums around the world. There are 136 Miyake stores in Japan and 134 more worldwide. He then designed handbags, watches and fragments before retiring in 1997.
Miyake, who was born in Hiroshima in southern Japan in 1938, was 7 years old when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1945, killing tens of thousands including his mother, who died of radiation exposure three years later, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in 2009. He said he never wanted “to be defined by my past.”
“I didn’t want to be labeled ‘the designer who survived the atomic bomb’, so I’ve always avoided questions about Hiroshima. You made me uncomfortable,” he wrote when urging President Barack Obama to visit the city during an Asia trip. “But now I realize it’s an issue that needs to be discussed if we’re ever going to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
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“I close my eyes, I still see things that no one should ever experience,” he wrote. “A bright red light, the black cloud shortly after, people running in every direction, desperate to escape – I remember it all.”
Miyake studied graphic design at an art university in Tokyo, and then clothing design in Paris, where he apprenticed to fashion designers Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy, according to Portal. He later moved to New York and then back to Tokyo.
Apple co-founder Jobs told his biographer that he asked the Japanese designer to make him a uniform for his company’s employees, but the idea was quickly scrapped by employees. Jobs, who died in 2011 at the age of 56, began wearing black shirts, often paired with stiff blue jeans and white sneakers.
“So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtleneck sweaters that I like, and he made me a hundred of them,” Jobs said, showing off a stack in his closet. “I have enough for the rest of my life.”
Suliman reported from London, Inuma from Tokyo.