In The Realm Of The Sensei
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday October 3, 1994
ISSEY Miyake is the master of contemporary design. One could hardly call it fashion.
His designs are beyond the changing realms of fashion. They take their form from the sculptural shapes of nature transmuted by the alchemy of experimental textiles specially developed by Issey Miyake.
Miyake is the designer's designer. He is the contemporary artist of dress. He combines the aesthetic sensibilities of a Japanese sensei (master), using the sparse shapes of traditional Japanese dress and melding them with the latest technology of textile fabrication. In a way he represents contemporary Japanese culture in microcosm.
As Paul Jellard says, "Miyake is not about fashion; he is more about a feeling and that feeling is timeless." Jellard has recently opened his first women's store next to his men's store, Five Way Fusion, in Paddington. And he stocks Miyake for women as he has for many years for men.
"I like his cleanness and construction," he says, and even though Jellard realises that Miyake does not produce commercial collections he is such an admirer of Miyake's work he decided to stock Miyake as one of the two main international designers for the new women's shop.
The other is Gianni Versace whose glamorous, sometimes glitzy, fashion statements are on the other end of the fashion spectrum. While Versace is very much about what is hot right now in fashion, Miyake clothes are without a use-by date. "We had a woman in recently who was wearing a Miyake that was 16 years old," Jellard says.
Seeing the Miyake collection at Five Way Fusion gives a sense of the artist's visual language - the stiff pleats in nylon that stand away from the body to make their own shape, or the extraordinary stretch mesh, or the silvery subtleties of fabric that seems to be rubbed away in places to create irregular transparencies. As Jellard says of Miyake's design, "the fabrication is nothing short of astounding".
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald