The 1960s often attempted to imagine the future of clothes – take a look at the designer Hardy Amies’ wardrobe for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, period pieces unmistakably from 1968. But while Amies clad Kubrick’s space hostesses in hard-seamed mod shifts, Issey Miyake was working on his first “constructible clothes” – knit pieces to be layered together at whim. Their seemingly simple shapes are soft, and their novel synthetic yarns sympathetic. They haven’t dated a day, and still look like they might be the future.
Miyake, who has died aged 84, always said he was not interested in fashion, only in design for living. He cared about relationships between people and the cloth enfolding and enwrapping their bodies, about cloth’s fibres and techniques. His simplicity referred back, to the ancient principles of Japanese clothing, rectangles off the loom folded and tacked together into garments, and forward, to computer-controlled processes for his 2000 line A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth), which extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments.
