Irving Penn on Issey Miyake

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Miyake never expected to reach old age. He was born in Hiroshima, the son of an army officer and a teacher, and evacuated to a nearby small town during the second world war. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, he was at primary school when he saw the flash of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven-year-old Miyake set out alone for the family house, 2.3km from the blast centre, searching among the heaped dead and dying for his mother. Yokoo is known for bringing influences of Pop and Psychedelia into Japanese art. “I’m quite confident about my influence on different parts of Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s,” he declared in a 2015 interview with London’s Tate Modern, listing all the fields he had been involved in, from design to film appearances, and noting of his textile work. “My collaboration with Issey Miyake has been going on for 45 years.” The two innovators met in New York in 1971, at the first international show of Miyake’s work at the Japan Society. Beginning in 1977, Yokoo has designed the invitations for all of Miyake’s Paris shows, in addition to creating prints for various collections. The 2005 exhibition Issey Miyake Paris Collections 1977–1999: Invitations by Tadanori Yokoo (poster shown left) showcased the output of this creative collaboration. — A.R

Part of the autumn-winter 1980 collection, Plastic Body (above) was the first work in Miyake’s Body series—a five-year effort to leverage various traditional and modern technologies to turn clothing into a sculptural medium. Made of molded fiber-reinforced plastic, Plastic Body is mass-manufacturable, a standardized, reproducible, synthetic skin to be worn over the wearer’s own. In the book Issey Miyake: Bodyworks (Shogakukan, 1983), writer Shozo Tsurumoto conveys the conceptual importance of skin in Miyake’s designs through two photographs of naked female torsos: one of a young woman and the other of an aging one. “The seamless and taut skin surface of the young body contrasts with the wrinkled and textured surface of the aged,” writes Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada. “Skin is portrayed as a two-dimensional plane that records the process of aging, imprinting the creases made by the force of time.” — A.R. Hambourg, Maria Morris. Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–1950. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2002. Models dance in 2019 as they present ready-to-wear creations by Mr. Miyake. Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London. The Photographer Collector's Guide, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979. Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Earthly Bodies. 76 Photographs of the Female Nude, Negatives and Silver Prints Made in 1949–1950 (exhibition catalogue). New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1980.Licitra, Salvatore and Lisa Licitra Ponti. "Irving Penn: Issey Miyake." Domus no. 701 (January 1989): 10–11. Hopkinson, Tom. "Great Photographers of the World, 1: Irving Penn." The Daily Telegraph Magazine no.287 (April 17, 1970): 34–44. Irving Penn Regards the Works of Issey Miyake, Ginza Graphic Gallery, Tokyo, December 24–December 28, 1999.

Irving Penn: Earthly Bodies. 76 Photographs of the Female Nude, Negatives and Silver Prints Made in 1949–1950. With introduction by Rosalind E. Krauss. Marlborough Gallery. New York, 1980.When Miyake started working on Pleats, instead of focusing on how clothes were made he thought about how they were used. He wanted to create garments that would be light and could be easily cared for. It was not just about using new technologies, but making things with obsolete machines or reworking materials. In the late ’80s, Miyake began research on pleating. Inspired by a lightweight polyester-silk scarf folded in four and pleated at an angle, Miyake went on to research a new pleating technique based on modern technology and engineering that would give way to many new forms of clothing. For Miyake, Pleats Please should be seen not as couture nor fashion but as “just clothes.” “After I began to make them, I finally felt I could embrace the word design,” Miyake once wrote. “By sending Pleats Please out into the world, I feel I have finally become a designer.” — P.M. Some label him an artist, others see him as a style visionary, but more than anything else, Issey Miyake is the designer’s designer. For more than four decades he has created textiles, clothing and accessories for people who embrace contemporary visual culture, but who find the notion of “fashion” at least slightly ludicrous. People, in fact, such as him. Sitting in a glass-walled corner room of his Shibuya design studio overlooking Yoyogi Park, and surrounded by immaculate postmodern vintage furniture by his late friend and collaborator Shiro Kuramata, he explains his credo. “I prefer the term ‘making things’,” he says. “I want to represent the action of thinking. We are working towards the concept of […] no fashion.”

Penn was given complete artistic freedom, leaving Miyake’s trusted colleagues Midori Kitamura and Jun Kanai to coordinate sessions in New York along with Tyen, who did the makeup, and John Sahag, who did the hair. “Twice a year, after we had returned to Tokyo, Issey Miyake and I would select clothing for me to take to New York to be photographed by Mr. Penn,” says Kitamura. “For me, the photo sittings were always filled with surprises.”Inventive Paris Clothes 1909–1939: A Photographic Essay by Irving Penn. With Diana Vreeland. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Saiki, Maggie Kinser. "The Ordinary that Surprises: Issey Miyake; Photographs by Irving Penn." Graphis 48 (July/August 1992): 32–49.

Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Cranium Architecture (exhibition catalogue). London: Hamiltons Gallery, 2013. Malcom, Janet. Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography. Boston: David R. Godine, 1980. What Penn's camera leaves out is always as important as what it includes. From omitting the fashion model from an early shoot (see his first Vogue cover, 1943) to eliminating the environment for the figure, his photographs use absence to stimulate appetite. Arrowsmith, Alexandra, ed. Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn: Sculpture, Prints and Drawings. With introduction by Alexander Liberman. The Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn Trust, 1994. Thornton, Gene. "Irving Penn—The Dangers of The Painterly Approach." The New York Times (September 5, 1982).Tuite, Rebecca C. 1950s in Vogue: the Jessica Daves Years, 1952-1962. London: Thames and Hudson, 2019. Irving Penn: Photographism, Pace Gallery, New York, January 8–February 18 (extended through February 20), 2021.