Issey Miyake Reality Lab, Tokyo
We’ve been fixated with all things Issey Miyake for decades – ever since we first happened upon his ravishing collaborations with photographer Irving Penn, which documented Miyake’s revolutionary body sculpture as a kind of unique force of nature.
While the main Miyake fashion lines are in the capable hands of Yoshiyuki Miyamae (womenswear) and Yusuke Takahashi (menswear), Miyake himself has been in the studio creating new revolutions in design with his Reality Lab team. The work is extraordinary – so we’re hugely excited that there’s now a Reality Lab store in Tokyo, in Omotesando (of course).
Reality Lab is the corner of the Miyake studio that is responsible for the remarkable 132.5 range, which has taken the A-POC (“a piece of cloth”) concept into unexplored territory.
The clothing within the 132 5. line is half sculpture, half fashion and is made using a mathematical algorithm – three dimensional shapes are conceived in collaboration with a computer scientist, and then the shapes are folded into two dimensional forms with pre-set cutting lines that determine the finished shape. Finally they are heat-pressed to yield folded garments (dresses, shirts and skirts). Everything in the 132.5 line is made using recycled material.
Alongside the 132 5. range, the new Reality Lab store – designed by starchitect Tokujin Yoshioka – also stocks the IN-EI lighting range, created with Artemide, again using recycled materials and the most advanced computer technology, along with painstaking handcraft
The Reality Lab store houses the Bao Bao range of bags – inspired by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – and the new men’s line Homme Plissé, which features a remarkable thick pleated fabric that’s as comfortable as it is practical; a radical kind of sportswear if you will.
With his Tokyo studio now in its fifth decade, Issey Miyake shows no sign of slowing down. He remains one of the most creative, dynamic and positive forces in international design.
Reality Lab, 1F, 5-3-10 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062
+03 3499 6475; isseymiyake.com