Without Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Would Not Have Been The Same.
In 1987, Issey Miyake started sending his collections to the photographer Irving Penn. Twice a year, every year until 1999, the clothes were shipped from Tokyo to Penn's studio in New York, and Miyake let him do whatever he wanted with them.
Miyake had admired Penn since he was a boy, when he first saw his work in a magazine his older sister subscribed to. They met in 1983, when Penn shot two Miyake pieces for American Vogue. The photographs changed how Miyake saw his own clothes. He said he had never thought of looking at them that way, that Penn had given the clothes a voice of their own. He asked Penn to shoot the next collection, and it became a routine that lasted thirteen years.
Miyake set the terms himself. Penn never went to a Miyake show. Miyake never came to a shoot. Each season the garments crossed the ocean and Penn, working with his own team and supported by Miyake's representatives, decided how they should be seen. He would sit with a pencil and sketch while the models were dressed, take Polaroids, shoot, and send the full set of transparencies back to Tokyo.
Miyake wasn't really in it for the campaigns. He wanted the pictures Penn sent back to Tokyo, so he could see his own clothes through them. He used them to look at his own work from the outside and to work out where to go next. He even credited Penn directly with leading him to Pleats Please. In his own words:
"Through his eyes Penn-san reinterprets the clothes, gives them new breath, and presents them to me from a new vantage point—one that I may not have been aware of, but had been subconsciously trying to capture. Without Penn-san's guidance, I probably could not have continued to find new themes with which to challenge myself, nor could I have arrived at new solutions."
Miyake's relationship with Penn shows the power of the archives. More than simply a record of clothes, they were a record of Miyake studying his own work through Penn, and using what he saw to decide what came next. This was thirteen years of one designer rethinking himself, through a pair of eyes working in a room he always stayed out of.
Without Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Would Not Have Been The Same.
