Issey Miyake Sport Eau de Toilette for Him - 100 ml

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Despite the end of Men, Issey Miyake Inc. will continue to produce the wildly popular HOMME PLISSÉ Issey Miyake menswear collection and various womenswear imprints, including mainline Miyake, PLEATS PLEASE and Haat . Miyake Inc. has not confirmed any changes in production for of the brands that it oversees, like tac:tac. A keen sportsman, function became the linchpin of Miyake’s work. His most famous and most affordable clothes, the Pleats Please line, was launched in 1993 as a retort to the price and unwearability of high-end fashion. Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo. But piqued by the crossover between disciplines, he pivoted to fashion and moved to Paris to become an apprentice to Guy Laroche and eventually work for Hubert de Givenchy around the time Audrey Hepburn was wearing his dresses.

Miyake kept the sorrows of his childhood private until 2009, and remained secretive about his personal life: his closest companions were his work collaborators, especially the studio president, Midori Kitamura, a former model.A-PoC Le Feu, by Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, 1999, an example of Miyake’s A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth) concept – extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments. Photograph: Yasuaki Yoshinaga/A-PoC Le Feu, Issey Miyake

Growing up just outside Hiroshima, Issey Miyake witnessed the atomic bomb explosion in 1945 in his city, aged 7. His mother died three years later, after being badly burned, and he suffered from radiation-related diseases. Photograph: Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters

In 1973, he began to show in Paris, distinctively different from other Japanese designers arriving there. His regular collections of sculptured, high-end clothes were spectacular, but the real fun came with a change of focus to volume production ready-to-wear lines through the 1990s. They brought him nearer his ideal, unfashiony customers. In a rare 2009 op-ed for the New York Times, Miyake recounted just how much that day, and his mother’s subsequent death, informed his creativity. “I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic. After witnessing the 1968 student protests, Miyake became disenchanted by an industry designed to dress only the wealthy. It was this interest in fashion as art and function, democratic but aesthetically pleasing, which led him to establish the Miyake Design Studio in 1970, and show his first very wearable collection in New York in 1971. One of his earliest pieces was a jersey body, hand-painted using traditional Japanese tattoo techniques.