We made mistakes in the 20th century. Who wouldn’t, with technology speeding everything up?
The 21st is even more dynamic and exciting but we can learn by thinking globally. Two great globalists, Issy Miyake and Hanae Mori have died this month, leaving legacies enriching lives across the planet, from East to West, probably, from North to South, too.
Making connections between the successful Japanese car market and Fashion in 2006, Akira Miura editor-at-large, Japan edition Women’s Wear Daily, expressed the idea that Hanae Mori, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake & Rei Kawakubo were the ‘dazzling’ designers who had encouraged ‘the cloistered world of high fashion to look East’.
A subtle Fashion invasion was taking off. Toyota introduced the Corona sedan to the US in 1965, just as Hanae Mori presented her first collection in New York. It was a critical and commercial success as her ‘Japanese aesthetics,’ blended with Western forms and went on sale at important department stores.
Akira Miura, ‘Four dazzling Japanese designers inspired the cloistered world of high fashion to look East’
Hanae Mori opened boutiques in New York and Paris and became the first Asian to join the exclusive Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Her reputation opened minds to the groundbreaking work and international style of later Japanese designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, whose creativity left ‘indelible impressions’ and indicated that, Asia could be a wellspring of inspiration, not just a base for textile mills and clothing factories.
Miyake’s stunning creations, ‘functional yet futuristic’ were frequently sculpted from a single piece of cloth. His influence spread to become a brand stamped on ‘luggage, home furnishings, even bicycles’.
Writing of how Comme des Garçons became a global phenomenon, in the 1980s, Akira Miura tells of how Rei Kawakubo brought her austere garments to the Paris catwalks in 1981 where they were seen as ‘almost anti-fashion’. Together with Yamamoto, their influence was so far-reaching that since then Fashion is identified as either ‘before’ or ‘after’ Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo told Miura, in 2006, that after reviewing a substantial number of her earlier pieces there was much she would ‘happily discard’, which prompted the WWD journalist to conclude:
“In an industry where reinvention and change is the only constant, that very un-Japanese dissatisfaction with the status quo has been an indispensable trait for all four of Japan’s great fashion iconoclasts.”
Cinema Fashionista 