First Look at Issey Miyake’s IM Men Paris Debut

PARIS — It’s two days before showtime and the team at Issey Miyake’s Place des Vosges showroom is calm. You almost wouldn’t know it, but big change is coming to the brand’s men’s runway this season: despite its current influence (see the plethora of imitations on the high street), it’s not the Homme Plissé line that will hit the catwalk on Thursday, but IM Men, a cherished project launched by Mr. Miyake in 2021, the year before his death.

Kudos to Issey Miyake, Inc. for its willingness to embrace change (new plans for Homme Plissé will be announced soon). Endless evolution, after all, is part of the Miyake ethos.

IM Men — with its emphasis on functionality for the everyday, and its use of one piece of cloth per garment, merging fashion and engineering to simplify construction and minimise waste — is a progressive iteration of one of the guiding principles of the Miyake design: the notion that bringing clothing as close as possible to its origin state as fabric enables a new, more intuitive and free relationship between wearer and garment.

Mr. Miyake was essentially a humanist — he aimed to make life simpler, and more beautiful — and IM Men is a new take on this everlasting principle. Where Homme Plissé is all about the possibilities of pleating, IM Men explores folding, which is essential to the Japanese way of seeing garments as flat items that become three-dimensional only when worn (the complete opposite of the Western idea of resculpting the body through what one wears). “Culturally we are used to flattening items like the kimono to save space when we store them,” explains Yuki Itakura, one third of the team that in 2019 was selected by Mr. Miyake to work on the project.

“In IM Men, folding, lightness and ease are tools meant to meet the needs of the contemporary wanderers and nomads: people who travel light, and need clothing that’s practical, beautiful and does not crease,” adds team leader Sen Kawahara. The third member — still en route from Tokyo — is Nobutaka Kobayashi. The three, all Miyake veterans, have different roles: while Kawahara and Itakura focus on design and engineering, Kobayashi oversees textile design.

Analysing the looks, with their floating lines, angular weightlessness and complex simplicity, one is immediately reminded of the work of Mr. Miyake at the cusp of the 1970s with its stress on galactic tribalism. A sensational coated fleece blouson with robotic shoulders, and a punched ultrasuede cape, both of which can be unzipped or unsnapped into a simple square, exemplify this. But the reference is not nostalgic; it’s a way to move forward: after all, what sets the Miyake aesthetic apart in its utter, almost primeval simplification, is the fact that it looks like it could belong equally to an ancient past or a distant future, while being of this moment.

“Issey-san conveyed 50 years of research and innovation, his quest to create everyday clothes that freed the wearer, into this project. We want to push this spirit and will into the next fifty and more,” says Kawahara. “The show concept is an homage to Fly With Issey Miyake, a show that Issey-san put on in Japan in 1977, and which was entirely based on enjoying one piece of fabric. To highlight this idea of lightness, we worked with a palette of non colours — white, black, and their graphic combination with primary colours — red, yellow, blue — and earthy tones, because the connection with the earth is important.”

“The ultimate message we want to release with this show is one of freedom and instinct,” concludes Kawahara. “Issey-san used to tell us that sometimes thinking too much can block action. It’s beautiful to just take courage and fly.”