No wonder Issey Miyake was Steve Jobs’ favorite designer.
The man behind Mr. Jobs’ personal uniform with black fake turtlenecks, who… died on August 5 at age 84, was a pioneer in many ways – the first foreign designer to exhibit at Paris Fashion Week (April 1974), one of the first designers to collaborate with artists, and an advocate of “comfort dressing” long before the term ever existed. But it was his understanding and appreciation for technology and how it could be used from an aesthetic point of view to create new, tantalizing utilities that Mr. Miyake distinguished.
Before there were wearables, before there were connected jackets, before there were 3D-printed sneakers and laser-cut lace, there was Mr. Miyake, who pushed the boundaries of material innovation to bridge past and future. He was the original champion of fashion technology.
It started in 1988 with the research of Mr. Miyake to the heat press, and how it could be used to create garments that started out as fabric two or three times larger than normal, which were then pressed between two sheets of paper and fed into an industrial machine. that shaped it into razor-sharp folds, which in turn became garments that never wrinkled, fell flat, or required intricate closures. In 1994, those garments formed their own line known as: Pleas please (later turned into a menswear version, Homme Plissé): A re-engineering of Mario Fortuny’s classic Greek curtains into something that’s both practical and outrageously fun.
Here’s how it went: Next followed an experiment where a continuous length of thread was fed into an industrial knitting machine to create a single piece of fabric with built-in seams that followed different garment shapes — which in turn could be cut out as desired by the wearer, eliminating production waste. Known as A-POW (a piece of fabric), the collection was introduced in 1997, decades before zero waste became a clarion call for the responsible fashion movement.
And then there was 132 5, which Mr. Miyaki debuted in 2010 (after relinquishing his day-to-day responsibilities, but remaining involved with his brand). Inspired by the work of computer scientist Jun Mitani, it consisted of flat items in complex origami folds that unfolded to create three-dimensional pieces on the body. The collection was developed in collaboration with the in-house research and development team of Mr. Miyaki, founded in 2007 and known as Reality Lab. (The name — not to be confused with Meta’s Reality Labs division, though arguably its predecessor — was later used for a Tokyo store as well.)
Pieces from all these lines are now included in the collections of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Artthe Museum of Modern Artthe Victoria & Albert Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They are extraordinary – soft sculptures that change and move with the body – but what makes them special is that they were conceived not only as beautiful things, but also as solutions to everyday needs (a core value of Miyake was the importance of “clothing to to live”) . And they also functioned as such.
This is where the black turtleneck comes in. It certainly wasn’t Mr. Miyake’s most interesting piece of clothing. It was perhaps even his most banal. But it embodies its founding principles and serves as the door through which anyone who isn’t really interested in fashion could walk to discover the Miyake universe. Mr. Jobs did just that.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that Mr. Jobs himself came into contact with Mr. Miyake through technology. At least, that’s what the late Apple founder Walter Isaacson told his biographer.
According to Mr Isaacson’s book“Steve Jobs,” Mr. Jobs was fascinated by the uniform jacket Mr. Miyake made for Sony employees in 1981. It’s made of ripstop nylon without lapels and has sleeves that can be unzipped to turn the jacket into a cardigan. Jobs liked it so much and what it stood for (corporate bonding) that he asked Mr. Miyake to create a similar style for Apple’s employees — but when he returned to Cupertino with the idea, he was “booed off the stage.” ‘. he said to Mr Isaacson.
Yet, according to Mr. Isaacson, friends, and Mr. Jobs visited Mr. Miyake often, only to eventually adopt a Miyake piece of clothing – the black mock turtleneck – as an important part of his own uniform. It was a garment that eliminated an odd crease at the neck, that had the convenience of a T-shirt and sweatshirt, but also the cool, minimal lines of a jacket.
mr. Miyake made him “like a hundred of them,” said Mr. Jobs, who wore them until his death in 2011, in the book. (Mr. Isaacson wrote that he saw them stacked in Mr. Jobs’ closet, and the book cover has a portrait of Mr. Jobs wearing, of course, a black faux turtleneck sweater.)
Even more than his Levi’s 501’s and New Balance shoes, the turtleneck became synonymous with Mr. Jobs’ particular blend of genius and focus: the way he chose a uniform to reduce the number of decisions he had to make in the morning, the more the better to concentrate on his work. It was an approach to clothing that was later adopted by adherents, including: Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. Also his ability to combine elegance and practicality in soft corners, not only in his own style, but also in the style of his products.
As Ryan Tate wrote in gawkerthe turtleneck “helped make him the most recognizable CEO in the world” Troy Patterson of Bloomberg called it ‘the robes of a secular monk’. It was so embedded in pop culture that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos she later took over as she tried to convince the world of her own Jobs-esque genius, even as Mr. Miyake with the style in 2011, after Mr. jobs. (An updated version was reintroduced in 2017 as “The Semi-Dull T.”)
It didn’t matter. At that point, the entire ethos of the garment was transformed. Before mr. Jobs mr. Miyake, after all, the black turtleneck was largely the province of beatniks and Samuel Beckett, associated with clove cigarettes, downtown, and poetry readings (including ninjas, cat burglars, and anyone who wanted to get up in the night). After that it meant paradigm shifts.
But it wouldn’t have been possible without Mr. Miyake. mr. Jobs was not the typical muse of the fashion cliché. But even more so than the architects and artists drawn to Miyake clothing, he has become the designer’s ambassador to history: a truly populist part of a legacy that has helped shape not only design’s tenuous inner sanctum, but also the essence of how we think about dress.
