Features

I was eighteen the time I wore an ISSEY MIYAKE dress, and it immediately struck me: there was too much fabric. The sleeves were three times the length of my arms—the neck, intended for a giraffe. It fit me like a glove, but it flowed past the floor, pooling around my feet. But procuring some scissors, the shop girls explained: “Make of it what you want.” They pointed to some lines deftly hidden in the fabric. “There are many options.” And just like that, the consumer becomes the creator and the boutique becomes a personal workshop.

An inversion of the consumer-creator relationship and a reconsideration of the place of technology and engineering in fashion design, the dress was a product of the now famous collaboration between Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara.

Viewed today as the Godfather of Japanese fashion, Miyake already had world renowned for his groundbreaking designs. Miyake created the ISSEY MIYAKE design studio in 1970, and spent the following decades challenging the conventional shapes and European traditions of high fashion. Miyake demonstrated particular interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, most notably with his launch of his Pleats Please line in 1993. A production technique that uses a special heat press technique to infuse simple, colorful fabrics with shape and texture, the results are light yet defined, free-flowing yet highly constructed. Further, the polyester clothing requires minimal sewing and corresponds with Miyake’s mission for beauty and function in innovative form.A-POC, which stands for “a piece of clothing,” and rhymes with “epoch,” is the latest technologically-driven line from the Mikaye-Fujiwara collaboration. , Fujiwara and Miyahi’’s collaboration, and their technologically inspired designs and production lines, respond to timeless a question for the fashion world: the delicate balance between high art and a commercial success.

Fashion has always toed a fine line between its dual identitiest’;it is pulled towards the two poles of ready-to-wear street clothes and haute couture. For many designers, the answer comes through the creation of two lines. Designers will show their hand-made high fashion on the runways of Paris and Milan, and spread their names with special, factory-produced collections for lower-end merchandisers. Yohji Yamamoto partnered with Addidas, John Varvatos with Converse, Isaac Mizrahi with Target. These partnerships allow a designer to meet the demands of a more consumer-minded business as well as maintain the freedom of high fashion expression.

The answer for Miyake and Fujiwara, however, came not from the production of two lines, but from use of a new means of production. Merging computer technology with the creativity of the consumer, the design duo founded A-POC—“A Piece of Cloth,” and rhyming with ““epoch.”” A revolutionary design technique, A-POC transforms a single thread into clothing sans coudre. The designer develops a pattern program, funnels a single thread into the knitting machine and presto—out comes a tubular piece of cloth, size and shape dependent on its intended use. Sewing is superfluous. Reliance on sweatshops disappears, as do long hours of hand sewing in Parisian ateliers. In a way, then, A-POC piggy-backed on the work of Miyake’s earlier work, using technology to bring new vigor and innovation to the fashion industry.

Yet despite the use of machine production, A-POC defies the tedium of the mass, factory-produced clothes. It is the consumer who adds the final artistic element, who becomes the final designer. Cutting along faint lines embedded in the production of the cloth, the customer chooses sleeve length, garment length, neck style and more—transforming a long tubular creation into a functional piece of clothing. With a pair of scissors, then, mass produced clothing becomes a custom-made dream.

The power of this form-function solution brought the duo much acclaim, and shifted Fujiwara’s career notably from the textile engineer to the fashion designer. In 2006, Fujiwara became the Creative Director for ISSEY MIYAKE, Miyake himself moving on to new pursuits, and in this role, he has continued the MIYAKE tradition of fusing technology and fashion. Preferring to focus on the new, the original, Fujiwara rarely takes inspiration from the past. His shows are never send-backs to the 1920s flappers nor an homage to Versailles circa Louis XIV. He emphasizes what is new, different, and possible in the modern age. His philosophy is simple: “I do not believe that any discussion of art is possible without bringing technology onboard.”

And even in his most recent work focused on nature, Fujiwara has maintained this dependence on the mechanical and the industrial. Exploring the ways in which technology mimics, preserves, even enables the natural, he illuminates the connection he sees between the typically opposing forces. Last month in Paris he showed “Color Hunting.” In preparation for this show—the Spring 2009 collection—Fujiwara took over 3,000 color swatches to the Amazon Rainforest, aiming to capture the exact, quintessential shades of the jungle. For Summer 2008, Fujiwara was captivated by all things Wind. “To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist,” the ISSEY MIYAKE Team explained. The collection thus included clothes unconventionally intended not to protect a person from the elements, but to enhance a person’s interaction with their surroundings.