Miyake Suit

 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/fashion/issey-miyake-dead.html

I have so many thoughts about his work, I have been building a blog just about his Vogue patterns, and no, I'm not ready to drop it today.

but I did haul this suit out to take photographs.

I bought this suit on EBay about 24 years ago, I almost fit it then, except for the waist, but I didn't feel I ought to alter it to fit me. So it's been hanging in a suit bag all this time.

The fabric is probably a poly/rayon blend gabardine, slight twill. It has only the Issey Miyake label in the back, no content, import, size labels of any kind, and no marks or indications that labels were cut out. It's always possible this label was put into this jacket to improve its sale chances.

Miyake or not, it has some clever ideas working in it, which remind me of some of the 80s 

It's got a high back/low front western jacket vibe to it, with a welted seam that works like a set of fitting darts that runs all the way around it (and the same seam across the lower back and the outside of the two piece seam)

this is probably the best representation of the color. yes, the lighting in my house is terrible

that welted seam goes all the way around from the front to the back

even into the lapel

It's deep

the pens mark the five seams in that back waist piece

the little belt feels extraneous, but it is sewn into the seams

And the pants?

Welted back pockets (4" deep, typical women's suit pockets at the time) and 2" cuffs.

the fly has a button fly guard

the front lining goes past the knees towards the hem (abt 6" short)

The pleat (there are two) under the pocket welt is 3cm deep. These are very baggy trousers.

Someone who knows more about these things will inform me, and I will keep this in my closet for as long as I have a closet.

And I will get the blog up and running someday.

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Things I did not know About Pleats Please

"Their prototype was conceived in 1991, when Mr. Miyake collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe to design pleated costumes for a Frankfurt Ballet production of Mr. Forsythe’s “The Loss of Small Detail.” The male dancers wore the pants, then switched to dresses, the women vice versa. Whatever they wore, they were free to leap, pirouette and soar."

More from NYT today

Kazunaru Miyake was born on April 22, 1938. (The character for Kazunaru in Japanese writing also reads as Issey, which means one life.) He walked with a “pronounced limp,” Sheryl Garratt wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2010, a result of his surviving the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, his hometown, on Aug. 6, 1945. When he was 10, he developed a bone-marrow disease, Ms. Garratt wrote, and his mother died of radiation poisoning.

He graduated in 1963 from Tama Art University in Tokyo, where he majored in design because fashion was not offered there as a course of study.

In 1965 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an assistant to Guy La Roche and Givenchy. While there he witnessed the May 1968 student protests, which inspired him to make clothes for everyone, not just the elite.

“I seem to be present at occasions of great social change,” he was quoted as saying in the 2017 book “Where Did Issey Come From?” by Kazuko Koike. “Paris in May ’68, Beijing at Tiananmen, New York on 9/11. Like a witness to history.”