Issey Miyake
All of Issey Miyake's poetics and art can be associated with two short words: light and joy. His clothes are a feast for the eyes and the spirit, an object of attention, astonishment, and wonder even for an audience alien to the world of fashion, but simply vulnerable to beauty.
The world-famous Japanese maison has produced pieces housed in the most prestigious contemporary art galleries, so revolutionary and futuristic is the technology underlying its creations. Any shape can be engineered, any chromatic shade brought to life, without ever trampling on the human, ancestral propensity to recognize harmonic canons. Miyake does not force one into efforts of comprehension and interpretation, because what he produces is something we would have already, instinctively, wanted to create ourselves. The garment-as-work-of-art is the expression and result of a powerful freedom of thought, emancipated from the constraints that the limited potential of materials would otherwise impose. If a technique is indeed capable of freeing matter from its objective limitations, then that same matter, in this case, the fabric, can become the object of any manipulation and be shaped and molded exclusively according to the artist's creative capacity.
Issey Miyake is not a designer, but a genius who brought art into daily life, allowing us to wear it. Whether one comes across a spectacular piece or a more reasonable and discreet one, one is always dealing with the same brilliant creation, because the fabric, the primary element, has undergone treatments that make it an unreproducible garment, except in the laboratories from which it emerged. Every collection exhibits structure and color, in their unlimited expressive possibilities, declined and experimented with so that enchantment and wonder may burst into our lives. A creative gesture of resounding generosity.
