Celebrated Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake passed away on August 5. He was 84 years old and founded his eponymous fashion brand. The renowned fashion designer, known for signature pleated clothes and bestselling perfumes, died of hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) as reported by the Kyodo news agency. A private funeral has already taken place in Japan.
The designer was also famous for producing the signature black turtleneck for his friend and Apple founder Steve Jobs. Miyake was well-known to work with traditional and modern fashion techniques during his long career. He was well known for his innovative styles and perfumes and built a global fashion brand. He apparently sent “hundreds of black turtleneck T-shirts” to Jobs which became his signature style.
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Miyake was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and was seven years old when he witnessed the atomic bomb explosion on the city in August 1945, dropped by the US. He was reluctant to talk about it as an adult and wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that he did not want to be known as "the designer who survived the atomic bomb".
In 1970, he established the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo and then went on to open his first Paris boutique. He developed a new way of pleating fabric by wrapping it between layers of paper in a heat process that stayed in place and didn’t wrinkle which lead to his signature Pleats, Please line.
(Source: AFP)
