Irving Penn on Issey Miyake

Product Information

This led to the development of the Pleats, Please range and inspired him to use dancers to display his work.

Volume One: 40 pages, with text in English and Japanese, illustrated with 3 color plates and others in black and white; Volume Two: 24 pages, 14-color illustrations and a poem by Shuntaro Tanikawa, in English and Japanese. He was known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances, such as L'eau d'Issey, which has become his best-known product. outlining the creative relationship between the two artists, a 9 minute 58 second animation was directed by pascal roulin. For more than ten years there was an extraordinary collaboration between Irving Penn and the designer Issey Miyake, one of the few figures to have taken clothes design into the realm of art. To look at the photographs is to see how Penn essentializes Miyake’s designs, bestowing them with a graphic clarity and a highly dynamic sense of how they can be worn.It’s an outfit that materializes Miyake’s principle that we all should continue to live by: “One always needs someone who can look over one’s shoulder and evaluate one’s work from a detached and objective point of view—someone who can act as a sounding board. This book was published to coincide with the exhibition Issey Miyaka Pleats Please held at the Touko Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in September 1990. In an essay for the 1997 exhibition catalogue Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, Miyake reflected, “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. Collecting photographs taken between 1975-1998, this bright and still forward-thinking fashion book shows how Irving Penn captured the work of Issey Miyake, and explores the artistic relationship between Penn, one of the most prominent photographers of the 20th century and Miyake, the iconic fashion designer.

A comprehensive set of images from their work together is reproduced in the photobook Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake, published in 1999 and edited by Mark Holborn. distributed for the trade and NOT FOR SALE, mostly color photos, not to be confused with either the 1988 or 1989 Edition of this book, (VV1/1)). Hardcover without dustjacket as issued, 24 pages; very good condition except moderate rubbing wear to covers; pages slightly yellowed at edges; no internal marks.A fine copy, the binding square and firm with slight dustiness along the top and bottom edges of the boards. The fabric's 'memory' holds the pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are ready-to wear. they span from spring/summer collection of 1987 through to the autumn/winter collection completed in 1999. The visual directness affirms the precise and calibrated way Miyake’s garments are designed and made, which is magnified by how Penn takes photographs.

Observers saw this as evidence of the relationship between fashion and technology and the idea of a garment as a kind of machine for living.From a young age, Miyake respected artist Isamu Noguchi, whose newness and sense of fun in his designs inspired Miyake. He ends by crediting Penn’s influence on his invention of permanently pleated garments, known as Pleats Please.