Issey Miyake greets audience at the end of a show in Paris, France on March 11, 1997. Photo: VCG

Fashion innovator Issey Miyake shook up Parisian style with his highly wearable avant-garde designs, saying he was driven to create clothes that "bring beauty and joy."

Alongside Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, Miyake was part of a wave of young Japanese designers who made their mark in the French capital from the mid-1970s, following the lead of fashion greats Kenzo Takada and Hanae Mori.

The fashion designer, whose global career spanned more than half a century, has recently died aged 84, an employee at his office in Tokyo told AFP on Tuesday.

"He died on the evening of August 5," she said over the telephone, declining to be named and without giving further details of his death.

Miyake's funeral had taken place, with "only relatives participating" in line with his wishes, and there were no plans for a public ceremony, she said. Public broadcaster NHK and other Japanese media reported the news of his death.

Throughout his global career of more than half a century, he pioneered high-tech, comfortable clothing, side-stepping the grandiosity of haute couture in favor of what he called simply "making things."

Among his inventions were the "Pleats Please" line, permanently pleated items which do not crease, refreshing an old-fashioned concept to exude fluidity and comfort.

The much-copied futuristic triangles of Miyake's geometric "Bao Bao" bag complemented countless chic outfits, and he made more than 100 black turtlenecks for Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Miyake also wowed runway audiences with his "A-POC [A Piece Of Cloth]" concept, using computer programming to cut whole garments with no seams.

"When I grow weary with where I'm going, or when I stumble, I'll return to the theme of 'A Piece of Cloth'," Miyake said in 2006 after winning the prestigious Kyoto Prize.

"From ancient times, in Greece or Africa, every culture has started [making clothes] from a single piece of cloth, or skin," he explained.

Known for his practicality, Miyake is said to have wanted to become either a dancer or an athlete before reading his sister's fashion magazines inspired him to change direction, with those original interests believed to be behind the freedom of movement his clothing permits.

'Open to everything'

Having graduated from Tama Art University in Tokyo, Miyake moved to Paris in 1965, where he studied at the elite Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.

In 1968, seeing protests engulf the French capital made him realize "the world was moving beyond the needs of haute couture for the few and toward simple, more universal elements such as jeans and T-shirts," Miyake told CNN in 2016. He established the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo in 1970, and soon afterward opened his first Paris boutique.

In the 1980s, his career was in full swing after he experimented with materials from plastic to metal wire and even artisanal Japanese paper.

Teamwork was essential to Miyake, who preferred the anonymity of his research and development lab full of textile scientists and engineers to the bright lights of the catwalk.

"You always see things in a different way when you allow others to become part of a creative process," he told the New York Times.

He pulled back from designing his Paris collections at the turn of the century and has since given a series of talented young designers their big break. But he continued to oversee the brand, and his obsession with technology endured, with everything from fabrics to stitching explained in minute detail in the notes of every catwalk show.

In 2016, when asked what he thought were the challenges facing future designers, he indicated to the UK's Guardian newspaper that people were likely to be consuming less.

"We may have to go through a thinning process. This is important," he was quoted as saying.

"In Paris, we call the people who make clothing couturiers, they develop new clothing items, but actually the work of designing is to make something that works in real life."

Miyake is perhaps especially revered in France, whose former culture minister Jack Lang came to Tokyo in 2016 to award him the Legion of Honour at a major retrospective. Lang, who still wears Miyake pieces he bought many years ago, described the designer in October 2021 as a "man of a deep humanity, open to everything."

"Issey Miyake is a researcher, a discoverer, a real inventor who conceived of and used new materials and textures the world had never seen," he told AFP.

Agencies