THOMAS: You are the only high-fashion designer who regularly works hand in hand with artists. How did you connect with Cai?
MIYAKE: About five years ago I heard through a friend that Cai was interested in working with me. I went to see him in his studio in SoHo, in New York, and he told me about all his ideas–he never stopped talking. Finally, I had to choose one idea. ““Express energy,’’ I said. He proposed to burn a design of a dragon on clothes from my line, Pleats Please, with gunpowder. In China, the dragon is a symbol of energy. And gunpowder is energy.
And then you began to collaborate?
Yes. I made the clothes according to how Cai was going to use them in experiments. He laid 65 items from Pleats Please on the floor, in the shape of a dragon. Then he put gunpowder on them, covered the gunpowder with cardboard stencils, also in the shape of a dragon, and weighted the cardboard with stones. He lit the fuse at the end of a trail of 65 garments, and it burned and exploded. In two to three seconds, you could see the result. Each piece of clothing has a mark of a dragon. He’s like a magician.
Fire has been a part of your design philosophy for a long time, hasn’t it?
It’s true. I often expressed fire in my design in the 1970s and ’80s, and I have a perfume called Feu d’Issey. So I was prepared for, and liked, Cai’s idea of fire and clothes.
How would you describe what you do?
Well, I studied couture in Paris and worked with Hubert de Givenchy, so I have the background in traditional French fashion. But ever since I started my fashion company in 1968, I have always considered my job as a new way of making things: creating new fabrics or coming up with a new technique or process, going forward, looking for new possibilities.
Like when you embossed fabric with gold leaf or printed colorful geometric designs on clothes with a computer printer?
Exactly. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s fashionable and sometimes it’s not. I don’t know if the people who buy my clothes consider it fashion, but they consider it clothing, and wear it, which is exactly what I intended. For me fashion is creating something that is in demand. But clothing is something people can take or refuse, something new, something that seduces. And that’s why I show in Paris–because it’s the only place that understands the difference between clothing and fashion.
Is fashion art?
No. I’m disturbed when people call me an artist. When I make something, it’s only half finished. When people use it–for years and years–then it is finished. The pleasure comes when people use my clothes. I may work with artists, but what I do is make things to be used, not looked at, like a picture or a sculpture. You can’t use art.
The Japanese designers in Paris–you, Rei Kawakuba, Yohji Yamamoto–are the radicals in fashion, the avant-garde element who push fashion into the future. How come?
I don’t like to go back in time or in history. To me, the weight of the fabric on the body makes the shape. I never use crinolines or corsets or padding to force shapes, but follow the body’s natural curves. Yohji, Rei and I have a different expression and process, and tend to have a different way of looking at and understanding clothes, but we aren’t constricted by the traditional rules of French couture. And we don’t concern ourselves with the current trend. In Tokyo, you can be more detached from the normal concept of clothes, so we are free to do what we really want to do.
