The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  Polo generally preferred licensing to manufacturing, but in recent years it has been buying many back in order to reassert control over all aspects of the brand. The firm operates about 275 retail and outlet stores in the United States and licenses more than 100 others around the world.

  Further reading: For Lauren’s work, see Colin McDowell’s monograph, Ralph Lauren: The Man, the Vision, the Style (2002), and for Lauren’s life, see Michael Gross’s Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (2003).

  31 ISSEY MIYAKE (1935–)

  In the introduction to the first book on the work of Issey Miyake, East Meets West, published in 1978, Diana Vreeland, then retired from US Vogue and heading the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, wrote, ‘His clothes are totally his and his alone. I love you, Issey, and the way you carry on and on and on, from your centuries old traditions, down through the ages, utilising your total instinct and great integrity to present artistry and beautiful inspirations that are so well applied to the present tense of East and West.’

  Miyake’s vision is unique. He was the precursor, leader and mentor of a new school of Japanese design, which took the fashion world by storm in the early 1980s. He was not the first Japanese designer to find fame in the West, but he was the first to create something new and revolutionary. He drew deeply on both oriental and occidental traditions of dress to produce the hybrid style that was to change everyone’s perceptions of what clothing could be.

  Born in Hiroshima in 1938, he was cycling to school on 6 August 1945 when the Americans dropped the atom bomb. He lost most of his family, including his mother, who was severely burned and died four years later. She had carried on working as a teacher despite her injuries. Perhaps as a consequence, he has always surrounded himself with strong, clever women. At ten, Miyake developed a bone marrow disease which affects him to this day. ‘The Japan I grew up in was a very poor country,’ he told Brenda Polan. ‘My generation dreamed of going to America. We believed the future lay there.’ Post-war Japan was dominated culturally by the occupying American forces. Within that culture the most desirable clothing for men was the classic Ivy League leisure wear worn by off-duty American officers—club ties, button-down shirts, penny loafers and navy blazers. Japanese women of the time craved traditional Parisian chic of the kind featured in the copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar that his sister bought and he read curiously—a desire which Hanae Mori, the first Japanese fashion designer to make a name abroad, sought to satisfy.

  Miyake never doubted, when he brought his clothes to New York in 1971 and to Paris in 1973, that they would have an international appeal. A lifelong experimenter and collaborator, seeking out the best, most creative minds to work with, he has probably always been confident in his vision of fashion, a vision which eschews voltes-face and looks instead to evolution. He is a clever, gentle, modest man, movie-star handsome and charismatic; consequently, he makes friends and lifelong fans wherever he goes. But a huge part of his magnetism derives from his passionate commitment to his ideas and his willingness to explain, to engage, to proselytise.

  Miyake studied art at Tama University in Tokyo, graduating in 1965 with a degree in graphic design. He had begun designing clothing in 1962, and in 1963 he presented his first real collection, entitled A Poem of Cloth and Stone, at the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. His stated—and possibly precocious—ambition was to show that clothes could be both utilitarian and visually creative. ‘We want,’ he said at the time, ‘to stimulate the imagination through clothing. Though these designs draw their inspiration from contemporary style, it is not really a fashion show. I think the next step will be clothing that looks to the future. There are many long dresses in the show not meant as eveningwear, but simply because of the form. I would like this show to mark the birth of visual clothing in Japan.’

  To develop his skills and his thinking, he enrolled on a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and spent five years in Paris and New York working with established fashion designers. He was less impressed by his time at Laroche and Givenchy than by the youth-focused, mini-loving vitality he found in the weekends he spent in London, visiting the theatre and the galleries, wandering the King’s Road, shopping and getting his hair cut.

  While he was in Paris, the political revolt of May 1968 disturbed everyone, even the denizens of the bourgeois salons of couture. The workers occupied the Renault plant and the students took to the streets, manning the modern-day barricades of burnt-out trams and dustbins and digging up the cobblestones to throw through the clouds of tear gas at the armed and armoured police. London, too, was witness to student rebellion and violence on the streets as youngsters, some left wing, all indignant, marched in support of their American peers being drafted to wage war in Vietnam.

  Miyake’s friend, the architect Arata Isozaki, wrote in East Meets West:

  I am not certain whether or not he had already formed his own critical opinion of haute couture, a staunchly regulated genre of international fashion. However, finding himself in Paris, a city full of suspicion and jealousy, faced by a language barrier which handicapped his liberty, he probably saw no reason to remain where he was, and thus, he took flight. One of the characteristics of the protest movement was impulsive body action; energy was burnt. After that, in the vacuum, the question loomed once again in front of him: ‘As a designer, what are clothes?’

  His flight from the world of couture took him to New York and the studio of Geoffrey Beene. There his attention was caught by the classless, genderless American uniform of jeans and T-shirt he saw worn by workers, weekending executives and militant students alike. Back in Tokyo in 1970, Miyake set up his design studio and looked back to his own cultural inheritance to examine the possibilities of Japanese work wear, its cheap but laboriously worked textiles, the kimono and the costumes of the samurai of the Edo period, costumes that were elaborately constructed of many simple, rectilinear garments and swathes of fabric. ‘I thought,’ he told Brenda Polan in 1983, ‘that the occidental clothing tradition was too tight. I wanted to make things that were free both mentally and physically. I had to free myself from the occidental tradition, of the occidental way, of occidental ideas. But there are still a lot of things to learn from them; it is important to respect that long tradition, the things that Paris couture was really about—even with all its elitism.’

  For the Japanese tight clothing was traditionally not at all sexy. ‘The Japanese body does not have sculptural beauty and expresses little sex appeal,’ wrote the painter, Tadanori Yokoo. ‘Sex appeal is a spiritual matter, not a physical one.’ Sensuality is found in large volumes of fabric, luxuriously textured, cut in imposing, almost abstract shapes, layered and wrapped. The Japanese use the body as a template for a three-dimensional sculptural shape. At rest these costumes have a kind of grandeur; in movement they have a fluid grace. They tease the senses through the imagination. They are subtle, the product of a social system which is constructed to ease relationships on a few overcrowded islands and which, consequently, is heavily reliant on ritual, formality and restraint.

  Miyake had developed a theory he called ‘peeling away to the limit’, throwing away all the inhibiting ideas about dress imposed by Western cultural imperialism and starting again from the beginning—the bolt of cloth, the hank of yarn. He began his great experiment with sashiko, the traditionally patterned, often striped, quilted cotton worn by Japanese peasants. He chose as his collaborator textile designer Makiko Minagawa, who was interested in mixing various yarns, natural and synthetic, to bring out the ‘essence’ of a fabric, exploring its potential for movement, texture and tactility as far as possible.

  At first the resulting clothing consisted of pieces of irregularly shaped fabric almost suspended about the body—Miyake was interested in the ‘space between’ body and clothing—each piece of which could be stripped away. This he developed into layering and wrapping, and his unparalleled feeling for texture, mass and volume
became apparent. He himself attributed much of his thinking to the influence of Madeleine Vionnet; she too preferred to suspend the fabric from the body and allow it to follow its own nature, assuming new shapes as the wearer moved. In his collections he would achieve magical effects, creating garments which arrived on the runway as one thing—a jacket, a kimono, a slender skirt—and which would, with the shrug of the shoulder, the swift movement of a wrist, become something else entirely—a skirt, a pair of shorts, a hooded poncho. His delight in all manner of materials led to experimentation with plastic, bamboo and various kinds of paper to produce masks, hierarchic headdresses, pseudo-armour reminiscent of samurai gear, and clothes that evoked thoughts of kites, heraldic banners, origami and modern abstract sculpture.

  Speaking to Susannah Frankel of The Guardian in 1997, he described his first half-hour show in Tokyo thus: ‘There was no music, just a sound system that picked up every little noise. The girl came out in many layers of clothing. She take off her shoes, throws them down. Bang! Bang! She take off garment. Ssh. She drop it on floor. Crash! She take off everything. She has no clothes. End of show. It become big Tokyo scandal. Sponsorship company beg me to stop.’

  Miyake has a talent for the small scandals that get big headlines. In 1976 he showed his collection in Tokyo on ‘Twelve Black Girls,’ led out by Grace Jones. In the 1980s in Paris he showed his collection on dancers and volunteers of all ages and genders, culminating in the 1995 show starring a group of octogenarians. His collaborations with artists—such as Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang among others—and the beauty of his exhibitions are legendary. Simply because they make such extraordinary pictures, the great photographer, Irving Penn, volunteered in 1986 to shoot all of Miyake’s collections—something he did with no interference from the designer for a decade. Miyake has claimed that seeing what Penn made of his clothes enabled him to understand his own designs more acutely. He has been given major shows in the greatest museums and galleries in Japan, America, France and Britain but making real clothes for everyone has always been at the heart of his work.

  He created Pleats Please in 1993, the year he was made a member of the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest accolade. A-POC (a piece of cloth) was the similarly egalitarian ‘cut-and-wear from a tube of fabric’ system he developed and launched in 1999.

  Miyake told Frankel:

  My first dream, and why I decided to open my studio was that I thought to myself, ‘If I could one day make clothes like T-shirts and jeans, I would be very excited.’ But the more I worked the more I felt so far away from doing so. I was always doing such heavy things, far away from the people. And then I was thinking, you know, ‘Are you stupid? Don’t you remember why you started designing in the first place?’ And then I thought, ‘OK, Pleats Please.’ So I started to think how to make it, how to wash it, how to coordinate it, even how to pack it. And I worked on how to keep the price down.

  Pleats had long been a theme to which Miyake returned in his main collection, and now he developed a separate collection, chiefly in machine-washable feather-light, uncreasable viscose, of simple, useful, comfortable pieces pleated vertically, horizontally, diagonally, cross-hatched, straight and wriggly that made interesting shapes on the body and often could be worn several ways. As Richard Martin and Harold Koda wrote in their catalogue to the 1994 Orientalism exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, ‘Hybrid styles by such designers as … Issey Miyake offer the paradigm of dress that cannot be located to a specific place but justly belong to the world.’

  Though he handed over the design side of the main line to Naoki Takizawa in 1999, Miyake continues to work on Pleats Please, and his style and influence are apparent in the company’s products. In 2007, a new creative director was appointed, Dai Fujiwara, after Takizawa left to form his own label.

  Further reading: See Mark Holborn’s Issey Miyake (1995) and, for background, Claire Wilcox’s Radical Fashion (2001).

  32 GEOFFREY BEENE (1927–2004)

  Like all the great designers who helped to shift fashion on to a new track, Geoffrey Beene challenged accepted criteria. His area of greatest experimentation was fabric. He was an early champion of postwar synthetics, often in the pursuit of that holy grail of women who do not have ladies’ maids or unlimited funds for dry-cleaning—uncreasable fabrics. A democrat both in terms of the modern lifestyle he assumed his customers led and in his refusal to accept ancien régime rules of dress or hierarchies of materials, Beene was a key exponent of the American sportswear style, a wearer-focused fashion concept which embraced the utilitarian and practical aspects of clothing and undermined all the conventions about what one could wear when and all the demarcation lines about appropriate fabrics.

  Typically, American fashion rejects the distinctions between what should be worn by day and what by night, the kind of ‘never wear diamonds before 6 p.m.’ rigidity which permitted the dowagers who ran society to spot a parvenu at 100 paces. Beene instinctively pursued a youthful customer who cared as little as he did for all those shibboleths. He was, as Jane Mulvagh, has observed, a leg man. ‘His clothes,’ she wrote, ‘were easy, flirty and showed legs, legs, legs.’

  While never compromising on quality of cut, structure or couture-standard technique, Beene played with mischievous juxtapositions: metallic lamé teamed with grey flannel, cashmere knit and taffeta, blanket-plaid wool and lace. He was one of the earliest American designers to introduce baby doll looks as well as gypsy styles and traditional ethnic fabrics, including simple cottons previously thought down-market. In the 1980s, when opulence was the order of the day, some of Beene’s most enchanting evening designs were the result of taking a conventional daywear style—a shirtwaist dress, say—growing it to floor-length, and then outlining and encrusting the luscious print in sequins and beads.

  Harold Koda, the celebrated curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, told Brenda Cullerton, ‘It’s like someone who speaks the English language and through use becomes a poet. His affinity, his exploration of the abstraction of cloth, has allowed him to push its possibilities in ways that are unimaginable.’

  Beene, who identified with the Pygmalion myth, said, in 1995:

  Clothes should look as if they haven’t been born yet; as if a woman were born into them. It’s a form of possession, this belonging of one to the other. You mould a woman into what you perceive her as being. What I do is the product of my admiration. I imagine women in an idyllic state. I create a vision of this woman, whether she exists or not. Doesn’t every human aim for perfection? For the possibility of it?

  At the heart of designer sportswear is the client, an active woman with a busy life and a need for comfortable, useful, easy clothes with pockets. The history of the style has two strands of antecedents: firstly, Parisian and American couture and conventional menswear for all occasions, formal tailoring to leisurewear, and secondly, Seventh Avenue, the commercial, factory-based heart of the American fashion industry which, like all of America’s late nineteenth and twentieth century industries, was almost obsessively focused on modernism (the modern movement mantra, ‘less is more’ was to come to apply to Beene’s work), on speed, practicality and the constant development and updating that fuelled consumerism. Industrial America has always been about hard-selling the latest thing, about whetting the consumers’ appetites, about an egalitarian emphasis on mass availability. In terms of clothing, the early sportswear designers—Claire McCardell, Vera Maxwell, Tom Brigance, Anne Fogarty, Tina Lesser, Bonnie Cashin, Halston—embraced a kind of version of Italian Futurism, an art movement whose exponents liked to picture the world in constant motion. These were the first designers to envisage women striding out rather than remaining languidly at rest. Arguably, they saw it not in terms of feminism but in terms of modernity, liberty and the American way. Beene, talking to Brenda Cullerton in 1995, defined beauty as ‘a measure of energy’.

  ‘I have never much liked rigid clot
hes or anything constraining,’ Geoffrey Beene told Brenda Polan in an interview in 1984. ‘I like freedom. I am an American; I love freedom and the brilliant clothes that are the American working uniform. I love sweatshirts, skirts and loafers, denim, baggy chinos, and I have never in my work deviated from the premise of freedom and effortlessness.’ Indeed in 1968 he famously designed full-length evening dresses based on the American football shirt and sequinned all over.

  His experimental, almost transgressive, approach to fabric made him attractive to the manufacturers of the new synthetic fibres that became an important part of the development of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he was one of ten international designers commissioned by DuPont to contribute to a promotional project for Qiana, a silky nylon yarn. He chose to have the yarn woven into a satin velour découpé about which he said, ‘Working with this material proved to me that synthetics could be perfected, for it was exactly like a pure silk velour, only it did not crease.’ He was disappointed in the long run by the way these fabrics decayed in his archive.

  Geoffrey Beene was born in 1927 in Haynesville, Louisiana, and he was never to lose that warm, melting molasses-over-ice-cream accent. There was also a formality to his diction that may have been dated but which was a joy to the ears of the literate. To call him a Southern gentleman is a cliché—and, anyway, he could be the most irascible and impatient of conversationalists, something of which even his biographer, Brenda Cullerton, complained. But he was cultivated, erudite and gently reared. The grandson of a plantation owner on one side and the town doctor on the other, one of his early sketches showed him attended by black manservant. He first demonstrated his interest in fashion as a boy by redecorating his room and getting his aunts to make up a fabric he bought—tiny orange flowers on a powder blue background—into beach pyjamas using a Simplicity paper pattern. A passion for the way cloth worked with the body was all he took away from three years in the medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans. ‘Cadavers were the moment of truth,’ he said. He wanted to cut for the body, not into it, and sketched movie star gowns on the margins of his copy of Gray’s Anatomy.