Latest news with #HommePlissé
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
Issey Miyake transforms the Cartier Foundation into living sculpture garden
PARIS -- As Paris wilted under the ruthless June sun, Issey Miyake sent out a battalion of intergalactic fashion soldiers at the Cartier Foundation Thursday, shimmering between art and menswear apparel in a spectacle where even the light was a player. The late-morning sun bounced sharply off the art museum's monumental steel pillars, forcing some guests to slide their seats to escape the dazzling reflections — an impromptu game of musical chairs set to a pulsing, kinetic soundtrack. This Paris Fashion Week season finds the Miyake house in the midst of transition. In January, Paris bid adieu to Homme Plissé — Miyake's pleated cult favorite that had anchored the city's menswear calendar since 2019 — as the brand shifted its focus to nomadic shows, most recently appearing under the Tuscan sun. The torch in Paris has now been passed to IM Men, the last line personally conceived by Issey Miyake before his death in 2022. Thursday's show marked IM Men's return to the Paris stage, under the direction of designers Sen Kawahara, Yuki Itakura, and Nobutaka Kobayashi. The theme, 'Dancing Texture,' nodded to the ceramic artistry of Shoji Kamoda, but also to the surreal choreography on display. Models appeared to roll, tilt, and swing through the light, their movements somewhere between ballet and a slow-motion video game. Occasionally, a guest would squint, unsure if they were watching a runway show or a heat-induced hallucination. The crowd — equal parts Parisian cool, visiting editors, and those for whom a pleated culotte is a spiritual calling — dodged the sun's glare and fanned themselves in the heat, shifting for both comfort and the best sightline. The first model glided out in a mad, angular hat, setting the tone for a parade of tin man-meets-space ninja silhouettes designed for dance floors or distant planets. The clothes themselves looked as if they had been engineered for a new climate — or perhaps a new species. Surfaces peeled, rippled, and shimmered, metallic foils flashed against the sun, and jacquard weaves evoked the carved waves of Kamoda's ceramics. Vermilion and white motifs burst forth alongside a near-neon green, courtesy of upcycled fishing nets. A coat unzipped into a dramatic collar while some blousons and pants, when laid flat, formed perfect circles — a wink at Kamoda's wheel-thrown plates. Miyake, who died in 2022, loomed large over the collection, his vision unmistakable in every engineered pleat and playful transformation. IM Men is the last line he conceived — a living laboratory for innovation, risk, and occasional absurdity, now energetically interpreted by a younger team. Even in his absence, his legacy is alive in every joke, fold, and jolt of surprise on the runway. Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake rose from postwar Japan to become a global force, transforming fashion in the 1980s and '90s with his radical, sculptural vision. He pioneered heat-set pleating and created lines like Pleats Please and A-POC that blurred the boundaries between art, science, and daily life. Miyake's designs liberated fabric, allowing it to move with the body and imagination alike. Of course, the fashion house's embrace of the avant-garde still courts danger. Thursday's spectacle occasionally veered into excess, with kinetic art and sci-fi headgear that threatened to upstage the clothes themselves — a familiar Miyake risk. But the best moments, like a pared-back tangerine overcoat that floated past, proved restraint can sometimes steal the show.
The Spinoff
19-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Spinoff
The Spinoff Essay: Becoming my own man of the year
Lorde has couched statements about her gender cautiously, but they're still welcome and radical for women who grew up thinking traditionally masculine traits were a flaw. The first time I realised I could choose to buy men's clothing was in April 2023. I'd worn 'old man pants' in the 90s (previous owner likely deceased) during a brief flirtation with grunge dressing, but that wasn't a conscious choice; it was the result of cultural instruction. Aged 43, I stood behind a curtain in a dressing room in the menswear section of 2nd Street, one of several vintage clothing stores in Hiroshima's Hondori shopping district, and pulled on a pair of Homme Plissé Issey Miyake pants. They were black, famously pleated and to the naked eye, had nothing to suggest they weren't the same as the black, famously pleated women's version of the pants. Only the label and the gaping at the crotch, fastened by two buttons, gave the game away. I'd landed in the menswear section after encountering a common problem for anyone of antipodean proportions. Japan is a mecca for vintage and preloved designer shopping, but it primarily caters for a domestic and smaller-sized market. Disavowed of the savvy and strictures of familiar culture and humbled by a lack of language, I had tentatively wandered up to the menswear section after realising nothing in the womenswear would fit. I took baby steps, grabbing a scarf that fit my restrictive idea of what was acceptably 'unisex'. Realising no one but me cared who I was or where I was, I moved towards items that, through cut, sizing, areas of coverage and decades of cultural conditioning, were more denotatively male: trousers, jeans, shirts, jackets and shoes. I left Japan with more menswear than womenswear. I haven't stopped browsing and shopping on both sides of the strangely upheld border between the two since, but it took a long time getting there. Growing up in the analogue 90s, before iPhones, social media, the mass adoption of the internet and the infinite splintering of cultural understanding, Western ideas of femininity were shaped by Hollywood and women's magazines. Despite Mum's best efforts to guide me away from these bibles, issues of Cosmo and Dolly (stolen from the public library) informed my friends and me about beauty, sex, sexuality and what it meant to be, and look like, a woman. It was a strange and contradictory time for feminism. The Girls Can Do Anything poster, on display in classrooms throughout the country in the 1980s, presented a wholesome ideal of women doing 'men's jobs' like welding and lifting heavy things. The 1990s were informed by a highly sexualised explosion of 'girl power' and corporate 'have it all' culture. It felt progressive, but at the zenith of mass and monocultural media, it was informed by singular ideas of desirability, identity and appearance. Xena, Warrior Princess (Lucy Lawless), now regarded as a canonical lesbian icon, appeared on the covers of Maxim and Stuff For Men – men's magazines in the tradition of FHM and Loaded – wearing her underwear. 'Xena as you've never seen her before.' As a teenager, and every day since, I have never once looked in the mirror and seen what I'd describe as a typically feminine face. I once took a celebrity look-alike quiz online and got Russell Crowe. My face, to be clear, is fine, and I have no doubt people looking at it might dispute what I just said. For me, though, I had a list of defects that took away from what I understood as 'pretty' and, therefore, what women should look like. My eyes were too round, and not almond-shaped or wide enough. My mouth was too small. My hair was never long enough, and my chin was too pointy. The most egregious was a lack of sharp cheekbones. 'I have no cheekbones,' I would wail, ignoring the obvious lack of complete facial collapse that would occur if that were true. I resigned myself to a simplistic binary: not 'pretty' meant masculine, and that wasn't something to embrace or even accept as OK. I vividly recall being described as 'handsome' by someone in passing and wanting to die. While I now share the view expressed by Tilda Swinton about her father and David Bowie in 2011, it got under my thin and stubbornly dull skin at the time. For a man, 'handsome' is good, but for a young woman with no reference points for embracing any kind of fluidity or positive connotations about masculinity as a woman, it was antithetical. I also absorbed ideas that being articulate, smart, 'intimidating', and a leader were masculine qualities, which were at war with the feminist ideals I was rapidly absorbing at university. To me, the pathway to being a fully-rounded woman was to wrestle those ideas to the ground, bludgeon them to death and reabsorb those 'masculine' characteristics as feminine. There was never any contemplation that a reconciliation could occur between the different parts of me, or that embracing masculinity as an act of positivity was an alternative. Through my 20s and 30s, I was very overweight. Year after year, the pages of my university diaries were a testament to the era's contradictions. Bullet-pointed goals included: 'finish Masters' (I did not) and 'lose 10kg' (also not achieved). I'd also discovered an admiration for masculine tailoring and androgynous fashion. Studying film, I spent hours falling in love with Katharine Hepburn's screen presence and her trousers. I watched Annie Hall and wanted nothing more than to sling a tie around my neck. By the time Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando arrived on my required screening list, I was completely besotted with the interplay between trickery, freedom, identity, gender and style. There's a particular cruelty in wanting to dress more androgynously when you already feel like your body occupies too much space and isn't conforming to a desired ideal. Choosing clothes that made me look 'bigger' felt like a form of self-sabotage, and clothes that weren't 'feminine' just highlighted broad shoulders and a wide back. Despite a growing mental catalogue of masculine sartorial icons, 'flattering' was the only style preoccupation I allowed myself to have. There was nothing more humiliating to me than having people think I didn't understand my own body or the rules that should apply. I did eventually lose weight via gastric bypass surgery. I've reconciled how that changed my relationship with my body privately and publicly. It also changed my style. I rarely wear dresses and frequently wear men's jeans, shirts and jackets. Driving through the heart of Auckland's University Central City campus one day wearing sneakers, men's jeans and a sweatshirt, I realised that aside from shape, there was no real difference from behind between me and the 20-something-year-old men mooching along Princes Street. The reasons for this late-stage and, by the standards of more enlightened generations, quaint transitory phase are ripe for an unfurling of caveats, discursive criticisms of just about every aspect of life today, and self-flagellation, but the most permissive and accurate description I have found is clunky and base. It's not my description but Ella Yelich-O'Connor's, and it's held together by the completely obtuse and amorphous concept of 'the ooze'. Two weeks before Lorde's single 'Man of the Year' landed, her interview with Rolling Stone was published. In it, she details how she came to a different understanding of gender. It's layered and authentically rooted in her own experience. She talks about an eating disorder, growing up famous, a break-up, therapy, anxiety and the relentless drain of existing in the limbo of being what people expect you to be and being yourself. She describes buying men's jeans, taping her chest and feeling like a man on some days, and a woman on others. The ooze is defined as 'the act of letting herself take up more space in everything she does, whether physically or creatively. Doing so opened the floodgates of her own identity'. 'My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,' she explains. She is careful not to overegg this disclosure, saying, 'I don't think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,' she says. 'I see these incredibly brave young people, and it's complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I'm not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I'm, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.' And she is. Despite her assertion that her gender expression isn't that radical, conversations about gender have simultaneously become more nuanced and visible, and contentious and dangerous enough to be ascribed the language and conditions of warfare. The war is cultural and ideological, but protests, abuse, violence and death are now its regular companions for those without the safety of Lorde's position. 'Woke Lorde accused of 'gender baiting' as she appears to come out as non-binary… but there's a twist,' screamed The Daily Mail, a publication that lives and dies by the potency and twisting of bait. I also write from a position of safety. I am a cis woman, and all I'm doing is wearing men's clothing. I wear makeup, dye my hair and sometimes remove my body hair. I'm not existing in a particularly unacceptable, challenging or radical way. When I put on those pants in Hiroshima, I wasn't challenging much at all, except my own restrictions. It was still a revelation. Revelations always seem like they're meant to be sudden. This one crept up over decades. Maybe that's what Lorde means by 'the ooze'. It's the slow acknowledgment that you're allowed to take up the space you actually occupy. Growing up on a diet of highly prescribed ideas of femininity, it's taken time to peacefully inhabit that space and not see traits traditionally ascribed to masculinity as a flaw. Nothing needs to be bludgeoned to death and absorbed to fit one of the binaries. It's expansive. Sometimes, to become someone more like yourself, you've just got to wear the pants.
Fashion Network
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
Issey Miyake in Pitti: Homme Plissé in Villa della Petraia
Home › News › Trade shows Download Print The key to any brand's survival over generations is the strength of its DNA and few marques have more stylish genetics than Issey Miyake, which presented its Homme Plissé collection Wednesday night in Florence. Issey Miyake spring 2026 collection in Florence - The great and much-loved Issey's greatest signifier – his endless pleats - was the leitmotif of the whole show staged in the garden of a Medici villa in the hills above Florence. And when one is talking about longevity few brands had a longer history than the Medici family. This season's Guest of Honor in Pitti, fashion's best organized trade show, Homme Plissé's location was Villa Medicea della Petraia, a beautiful villa overlooking the capital of the Renaissance bathed in sunset light. The fall 2025 clothes, in turn, were highly respectful of the brand's DNA, with every single look containing one pleated element. The heart of the matter was the quirky cutting and tailoring, where pleated shoulder holsters covered redingotes, or cardigans came with tunic/dresses. Issey Miyake spring 2026 collection in Florence - Miyake was a world leader in fabric recycling – famously opening a shop in Ginza two decades ago all of whose products were made of recycled bottles. A tradition respected with some very cool translucent nylon raincoats and jerkins. Made in a palette of Clongowes Wood purple, faded lime, sinful red, or priestly black – there were scores of very fashionable and wearable clothes. One of Japan's greatest designers, Issey Miyake founded his eponymous house in 1970. He built an iconic body of work defined by technologically driven fabrics, artistic silhouettes, unique collaborations, and a long-term fascination with pleated textiles—hence the collection's name. Pre-show, waiters looking very swish in classic Homme Plissé pleated recycled polyester jackets served clever cocktails in mixes of gin, ouzo or Japanese tea. Guy and girl models wandered around the narrow paths of the villa's ornate garden and like a lot of fashion displays in gardens, the show never really took off. Nor did it rise to a crescendo, especially as no designer took a bow. Still, Issey always dreamed of dressing a generation with a certain gentle elegance, and this collection continued that idea. Issey Miyake spring 2026 collection in Florence - Inside the beautiful villa, guests had toured around a very slim elevated - pleats covered – circular table bearing a whole series of abstract painted illustrations. The show invitation actually came with a very slim Perspex Natura paintbrush. Beside the sketches were printed fabric swatches in the same designs. Many subsequently appearing in some gloriously vibrant colors – dense red and orange dawns; moody autumnal browns; or green and yellow abstractions. All these sketches presented underneath some magnificent frescos by the artist Volterrano, celebrating the glories of the Medici family. Their famed five six ball emblem prominently displayed. Which, in a sense, this show mimicked by celebrating the ever-powerful DNA of the late great Issey Miyake. Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved.
Fashion Network
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
Issey Miyake in Pitti: Homme Plissé in Villa della Petraia
The key to any brand's survival over generations is the strength of its DNA and few marques have more stylish genetics than Issey Miyake, which presented its Homme Plissé collection Wednesday night in Florence. The great and much-loved Issey's greatest signifier – his endless pleats - was the leitmotif of the whole show staged in the garden of a Medici villa in the hills above Florence. And when one is talking about longevity few brands had a longer history than the Medici family. This season's Guest of Honor in Pitti, fashion's best organized trade show, Homme Plissé's location was Villa Medicea della Petraia, a beautiful villa overlooking the capital of the Renaissance bathed in sunset light. The fall 2025 clothes, in turn, were highly respectful of the brand's DNA, with every single look containing one pleated element. The heart of the matter was the quirky cutting and tailoring, where pleated shoulder holsters covered redingotes, or cardigans came with tunic/dresses. Miyake was a world leader in fabric recycling – famously opening a shop in Ginza two decades ago all of whose products were made of recycled bottles. A tradition respected with some very cool translucent nylon raincoats and jerkins. Made in a palette of Clongowes Wood purple, faded lime, sinful red, or priestly black – there were scores of very fashionable and wearable clothes. One of Japan's greatest designers, Issey Miyake founded his eponymous house in 1970. He built an iconic body of work defined by technologically driven fabrics, artistic silhouettes, unique collaborations, and a long-term fascination with pleated textiles—hence the collection's name. Pre-show, waiters looking very swish in classic Homme Plissé pleated recycled polyester jackets served clever cocktails in mixes of gin, ouzo or Japanese tea. Guy and girl models wandered around the narrow paths of the villa's ornate garden and like a lot of fashion displays in gardens, the show never really took off. Nor did it rise to a crescendo, especially as no designer took a bow. Still, Issey always dreamed of dressing a generation with a certain gentle elegance, and this collection continued that idea. Inside the beautiful villa, guests had toured around a very slim elevated - pleats covered – circular table bearing a whole series of abstract painted illustrations. The show invitation actually came with a very slim Perspex Natura paintbrush. Beside the sketches were printed fabric swatches in the same designs. Many subsequently appearing in some gloriously vibrant colors – dense red and orange dawns; moody autumnal browns; or green and yellow abstractions. All these sketches presented underneath some magnificent frescos by the artist Volterrano, celebrating the glories of the Medici family. Their famed five six ball emblem prominently displayed. Which, in a sense, this show mimicked by celebrating the ever-powerful DNA of the late great Issey Miyake.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dreamy Hair With Clothes to Match
A head of flouncy curls made Billy Willis easy to spot as he was strolling through London on a Saturday in March. Mr. Willis's hair, along with his layers of loose pleats in cool tones, gave him an elegantly refined flow. While describing his ensemble, he confirmed what I had thought upon seeing it: that the clothing was all Issey Miyake (specifically, from the brand's Homme Plissé line). It turned out that Mr. Willis, 21, worked at a nearby Issey Miyake store and was on a break when we met. But he was a fan of the label and its eponymous Japanese designer long before he got the job about a year and a half ago. 'I got my first piece at 14 from a friend who was buying some pieces from the '90s,' Mr. Willis said. He added that his sartorial inspirations included people he described as 'accidentally well dressed' or, as he put it, those who 'have no intention of being fashionable.' 'They have just found a style that works for them and developed it throughout their life, which often leads to their clothes telling interesting stories,' he said. As for his hair, he explained that he started growing it out seven years ago when he was looking for ways to style his thick, fuzzy curls. 'It just stuck ever since,' Mr. Willis said, 'and I think the style unintentionally guided how my way of dressing has developed. And it keeps my ears warm in winter!' Tap to see more looks
