Issey ...
The smartly-dressed man under the black arrow is Issey Miyake.
Last week he died of liver cancer at the age of 84.
Miyake was a leading light in the Japanese design world, a fashion impresario who applied his talents widely.
Living in Japan brought Miyake's world into mine, and I feel his loss.
In this picture, Miyake is shown with the other directors of Design Sight 2121 - Naoto Fukusawa, Noriko Kawakami and Taku Satoh.
Design Sight is often described as a "design museum" for convenience, but it is much more than that. It is a platform for Japanese aesthetics.
Miyake founded Design Sight as a place to create interest in, and expand the audience for Japanese design sensibilities, everywhere. The exhibitions at Design Sight explicitly try to unpack familiar ideas in new ways - their "potentiality" as one weird translation explains.
Design Sight was a favorite of mine and I visited often, seeing a range of exhibitions on themes from zakka (household stuff) to dobuku (civil engineering) to kome (rice) to mingei (folk art). To produce these exhibitions, the museum's directors and curators brought together various entities - Japanese government ministries, nonprofit foundations, the private sector, the creative community - anyone and everyone needed to fully realize the subjects.
Where did the idea of the Design Sight come from?
I believe it came from Miyake's own life experience. As an artist, he collaborated widely and always had something going on with someone, somewhere. It seems he took energy from this, and wanted to package and share Japanese design with the rest of the world. In a snap, Miyake took the Design Sight from a good idea to a foundation with a beautiful Tadao Ando designed gallery in Roppongi.
A favorite example of a Miyake collaboration was his creative partnership with Austrian ceramic artist Lucie Rie. He curated multiple exhibitions of her work in Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto) in a way that very clearly influenced the utsuwa that we see today. The exhibition catalogues from these shows are works of art in themselves. It was two way, of course, and Miyake stitched Rie's ceramic buttons into his fashion designs as well.
In the fashion world, Miyake became famous for his bold, premise-setting ideas. Starting with APOC (a piece of cloth) and concept clothing at Fashion Week, he was an original force. The downside for Miyake of being early-on-the-curve is that he had to create his own supply chain, including starting up his own commercial boutiques like Pleats Please. In our neighborhood, Daikanyama, the Pleats Please shop window always had imaginatively sculptural garments in the window that made one stop and look. And think.
Miyake's life was not all beauty. There was sorrow too.
Many people do not know that Miyake was a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima that interrupted his life as a seven-year-old boy. Perhaps it was this experience that lit the flame inside him that drove him to achieve so much. And to inspire so widely.
As I was reading one of Miyake’s many remembrances and obituaries, it occurred to me that the kanjis that form his first name 一生 (Issey) when separated mean something like "one" and "life".
What a life it was.
Here are a few links to get to know him better ...
http://www.2121designsight.jp/en/designsight/directors.html
https://www.2121designsight.jp/en/program/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/fashion/issey-miyake-dead.html
