I received my acceptance to join Miyake Design Studio not long after the catastrophic earthquake in Kobe and the Sarin attack in the Tokyo Subway. I couldn’t wait to leave my parents’ home in deep suburbia, seventy-five minutes across the Tunnel, west of New York City. Friends asked why I’d consider moving to such a dangerous city. It was early 1996.
For a recent design student, nothing could have been more exciting in the mid-90s than arriving at the studio: for design aficionados, IFYYK applies. If you’re not a fashion fan, here’s a fun fact for context: my first job was the birthplace of Steve Jobs’ black turtlenecks. Aesthetic, technology, emotion, ease: qualities seen in the work of Issey Miyake.
École Issey Miyake: The Miyake School
The studio was as magnificent a school as it was an illustrious design company. Many of us, past and present employees of the Miyake Design Studio and its sister companies, refer to our work experience at the studio as Miyake Gakkō, or Miyake School. We addressed Issey-san as our sensei; teacher or master in Japanese.
The learning environment at the Miyake School differed from anything I’d known. It was colorful, tactile, and full of contrast. The studio buzzed from layers of sound: electronic music, laughter from jokes, and the bellowed requests by the design head for swatches to be brought in. Working alongside the design team, I studied how ideas translate and are interpreted into form. The textiles lab had a distinct air of serenity. It was the only woman-led and women-dominated team in Design. It reminded me of a kitchen in a Michelin-starred restaurant, with neat swatches of beauty for the mise-en-place: samples of fibers, yarns, weight, washes, finishes, texture, color, gauge, weave, dyes, hand. Intently, I watched the precision and iteration demonstrated by pattern-makers. The atelier was frantic with multiple and competing deadlines, yet silent from focused concentration and hushed reverence to what was emerging from draped fabric. The meeting room was full of light where ideas would cascade, and where well-intended suggestions fell silently into pools of shadow on the floor. I learned about strength and reliability from the cordial ex-military police officer who was Issey-san’s loyal driver and security detail. I reveled in the intellectual banter around me and aesthetic fireworks from all the motley guests to the studio, titan artists and designers ,architects, journalists from all over the world, as well as my colleagues from Paris and New York. All of this nourished me as I grew into myself at one of the most respected fashion houses in the world.
Issey-san fed us with ideas, stories, fiery sermons, and good, honest food. Team meals were family dinners. I sought comfort in the home-cooked Japanese meals prepared by the motherly culinary instructor who came to the studio on evenings of important fittings. In many ways, we were home. This is where we worked, studied, ate, squabbled, laughed, selectively confided our secrets, and made things. This is where we grew.
At the head of any table was Issey-san, with his tea set on a black lacquer tray, his pencils and markers, and a cheerful canister of Ricola, if we were in a meeting. He was our father, generous and gregarious with his guests. He was tough-loving, joke-loving, pensive and often stern at home with us, his children. He ran a tight ship. There were our two eldest brothers in design, a slew of middle children, each one with their brilliance and their weirdness. Sisters. A baby brother arrived not long before the year 2000. And a host of aunties, helicoptering over us with good reason.
For most of my time at the Miyake School, I felt like the runt invited in as a foster child: the ugly, awkward, semi-gifted child no one quite knew what to do with. I was lucky to have two mothers who not only gave me effortless style lessons for decades to come, but with concerted effort did come to know what to do with me. They sent me on meetings and shoots. They sent me into editing rooms. They kept me both in and out of sight from Father with clockwork-like precision. They orchestrated timing for an audience with Father for everyone in the Studio. It wasn’t so different from creating a model lineup with timing for walkouts onto the runway for all the fashion shows we produced.
As a family, we ate together on the second floor. Smaller groups of us ate in neighborhood hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop joints. For those of us who went to lunch with the press, we went to fancy fashion places and good, classic eateries. In Japanese, we have a saying, eating from the same rice pot. It’s similar to being cut from the same cloth. In the case of Miyake School alumni, we’re cut from, and are still attached to each other by invisible threads. It’s apt. After all, it always came back to the idea of A Piece of Cloth for Issey-san.
Alumni
I see fellow alumni and where they are today. Some have remained with and grew up the ranks in the Studio, others in its operating company. Others of us have flown the coop to start our own businesses or help bring innovation to the industry, through accessible global Japanese brands like Muji or UNIQLO. Outside of the Studio, my former counterparts at the studios of Irving Penn and the great Ikko Tanaka seem to have had similar trajectories. We all worked hard, had a penchant for working like artisans, loved what we did, felt a little torn when we were criticized for hard work that didn’t make the cut. Yet, we emerged earning confidence, and helped to shape the world we live and work in. Beauty, order, rigor, and forms of thoughtfulness became a way or life and work.
Identifying the work of former Miyake students is easy: in every former student is the wonder, joy, delight, and rigor Issey-san brought to everything he touched: a new collection, a perfume, an exhibition, a new confection to share; a new collaboration with an emerging designer or artist. Everything came to life near Issey-san.
The legacy he’s given us– whether it’s our cousins who bear the torch at the studio, or those of us who have flown the coop- is the courage to create what we don’t see in the world. And to offer opportunities to experience joy and wonder.
The Après-Life: Fashioning IDENTITY AND MEANING
Thanks to the training I received at the Miyake school, I was later accepted to graduate school at the Margiela School in Tokyo and Paris. As a result, I had the privilege of working with the greatest designers of the twentieth century: visionaries who asked bold questions, shaped what we wear, how we wear it, and invited those who wore their clothing to join the conversation. My time at both schools was a learning in both the possibilities and the limitations of clothing. It refined my expectations of the design process and of fashion itself.
I’ve since left fashion.
People often ask, “How did you start as an art director and become a consultant for organizational design and leadership development?” It’s simple: it’s design. While my medium’s changed, I’m still designing for good. I’m partnering with organizations to create better outcomes and what’s yet to emerge. I help to midwife identities, new possibilities that lie unexplored or dormant in a client. It’s not so different from consulting a company on producing a collection, and helping people out of the fitting room so they may see themselves in bold, new ways: “What do you see, and how do you feel right now?” I help people to see who they can and want to become. I ask them how do they want to be known, what’s in their way, and the very first step to make it happen.
That’s design. Maybe it’s always design. It started in Tokyo, with Issey-san who didn’t know what to do with me, and my roost of aunties and mothers who made sure I learned from him. Learn I did.
Fashion is not known for its inclusive nature. For two decades, I believed there wasn’t a place for me in fashion, contrary to the output of work I created during my tenure there.
In the past week, obituaries and tributes to Issey-san flooded my social media feed. I was reminded of Issey-san’s origins and how he carved a place for himself as a leading designer on the world’s stage in Paris, against the odds. I saw how being continually present to his work made him a great thought leader for innovation.
Reflecting between each obituary and article, it slowly dawned on me: most of my brothers and sisters had been accepted to the Miyake School for degrees in Design; I had not. I was a the School for a degree in the Human Sciences, with a focus on Belonging and Resilience, and Psychological Safety. My fieldwork and case studies were in fashion innovation. My siblings are brilliant masters of creating clothing from a single piece of cloth. I’d become a master of building transformation experiences, eliciting individual and collective meaning from people who weren’t sure how they’re connected to each other, or themselves; and emerged knowing they were a part of something bigger than themselves. What we all had in common was a relentless curiosity and an ability to let it guide us.
Today, I know I’m not ugly, if not a classic beauty. I’m a little weird but not entirely awkward. I wasn’t a runt, just a late bloomer. I didn’t get adopted out of foster care but I’ve learned to create families of my own. I’ve grown into myself, thanks to what I learned from the Miyake School and the tough love I couldn’t see for love at the time.
One Life
“Issey” means One Life.
A great life lives through all who have had the honor of knowing and learning from him. It lives through the lives of the people we’ve had the privilege to touch.
Thank you, Issey-san.
May your legacy of more magic, wonder, and delight in the world live through us all. May your practice of focus, persistence, creativity, and advocacy give us peace in our moments of struggle, and strength in all our efforts.
Remembering Issey-san and the Miyake School. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe
This tribute is based on my time at the Miyake Design Studio and Issey Miyake Inc, from 1996 to 2000.
