Kyodo News
Issey Miyake’s signature pleats and modern elegance will be remembered, but for many New Zealanders, his name is probably most familiar from a perfume bottle.
Harriet Pudney is a beauty aficionado and former Stuff journalist who lives in Melbourne.
Fashion is one of those industries many people are comfortable dismissing as frivolous, unserious, not worthy of real respect or regard. I get it – a lot of fashion people really are just this side of Zoolander. But it’s the fourth-biggest industry in the world, and at its best, it produces real art and defines an era.
Think of Alexander McQueen and his runway shows which were more theatre than commerce. Think of Calvin Klein slip dresses and the 1990s chic they typified.
Think of Issey Miyake. The Japanese designer died of liver cancer this week at 84, after a decades-long career that included spells in New York and in Paris working with Givenchy. A survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Miyake wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that the experience was never far from him.
“When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience,” Miyake wrote. “I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.”
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Miyake tried to put those horrors behind him, “preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy.”
“I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic,” his piece in the New York Times continued.
What a life and what a legacy. Miyake’s signature pleats and modern elegance will be remembered, but for most New Zealanders, his name is probably most familiar from a perfume bottle.
Michel Euler/AP
Issey Miyake opens the Making Things exhibition in Paris in October 1998.
Launched in 1992, L’eau d’Issey was one of the most popular perfumes of the decade. With a conical frosted glass bottle and a domed cap inspired by moonlight on the Eiffel Tower, it spoke to that decade’s clean, refined minimalism like nothing else.
As a kid in the 90s, it looked to me like the peak of grown-up sophistication, representing adulthood, experience and elegance. It was the stuff of duty-free counters and dinner dates when even a trip to Australia seemed impossibly luxe.
Perfumes that get that popular tend to be pretty approachable: they need to suit a lot of people. L’eau d’Issey isn’t what you’d call confrontational, instead inspired by a fresh, clean waterfall and water on a woman’s skin .
They call it an aquatic floral, with head notes of lotus, rose and melon moving through a heart of lily and peony to a woody, musky base. It’s a soft, gentle scent, layered and pretty rather than intense or sensual.
Your mileage will vary depending on where your life was at in 1996 and how fond the memories it brings back are. I guarantee you’ll recognise it, though.
This was Miyake’s genius. He made truly beautiful clothes that didn’t restrict their wearer, instead celebrating freedom, movement and physicality. His fragrances reflect that same attitude. Miyake wanted people to feel good and at ease in his work.
Miyake told the Guardian in 2016 that “actually the work of designing is to make something that works in real life.”
There he was: a true artist, but unpretentious. What a loss.