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Issey Miyake is perhaps the most important Japanese fashion designer of the last 30 years.
Issey Miyake, the renowned Japanese fashion designer, died of liver cancer in Tokyo at the age of 84.
Known for his innovative styles and perfumes, Miyake built a global fashion brand, including designing the iconic turtleneck sweaters worn by the late Steve Jobs.
According to his company Miyake passed away last Friday and his funeral took place over the weekend.
Miyake, who was born in the city of Hiroshima in 1938, was just seven years old when the atomic bomb dropped by the United States devastated his hometown.
Despite this fact, Miyake refused to speak out about the attack, and in an article he wrote for The New York Times in 2009, he admitted as much didn’t want to be recognized as a “designer who survived the atomic bomb”.“.
“When I close my eyes I still see things that no one should experience, so I prefer to think of things that can be created and not destroyed and that bring beauty and joy,” he wrote on the occasion.
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His designs were considered revolutionary.
When he was young, Miyake wanted to be a dancer or an athlete, but that changed after reading his sister’s fashion magazines.
After studying graphic design at the University of Tokyo, he moved to Paris in the 1960s, where he worked with renowned designers such as Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy.
He also lived in New York and eventually moved to Tokyo in the 1970s to found the Miyake design studio.
In the 1980s he was hailed as one of the pioneering designers in using materials such as plastic and metal and combining them with other materials more traditional in Japan such as paper.
Miyake managed to develop a new way of folding fabric by wrapping it between layers of paper in a heat press.
This technique became a success after he was able to prove after several tests that the pleats stayed in place and did not wrinkle, leading him to create his famous Pleats, Please line.
However, his innovative methods were not only limited to the textile sector, but also to that of perfumes. It is estimated that a bottle of L’Eau d’Issey, his perfume brand, is sold every 14 seconds worldwide.
His creations are now in museums. A copy of his creation A-POC (which translates to “a garment”) is kept in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. which uses a special knitting machine that makes suits from a continuous tube of fabric.
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