Pleats Please is Everywhere All at Once Again
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Few classes of creative people are as doctrinaire about dress as architects and interior designers. Le Corbusier favored double-breasted suits. Pierre Yovanovitch swears by Comme des Gar?ons, as do Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci of Milan’s Dimore Studio. Rafael de Cárdenas became familiar with Pleats Please Issey Miyake during his time at Calvin Klein, where he worked in the ’90s as a men’s wear designer.
“Calvin always flirted toward the Japanese,” de Cárdenas says. “He loved Yohji Yamamoto and Miyake.” Personally, de Cárdenas thought the look matronly, but then something changed, and the -Brooklyn-based architect found himself wearing the line more and more, specifically the midcalf shorts of its men’s offshoot, Homme Plissé, clothes immediately recognizable for their origami-like texture and boxy silhouette. At Totokaelo once, he bought a pair of pants that taper from large pleats at the top to compact, narrow folds at the ankle, and he never looked back.
“My partner asked me if I was wearing my mom’s clothes. She’s big into the elegant sack thing,” de Cárdenas tells T&C. “But it’s a good way to look smart when you’re actually wearing sweatpants.”
Mom jokes aside, de Cárdenas is but one Pleats Please disciple; the inner sanctum of the tribe are found in the design, art, and fashion worlds. Zaha Hadid was a fan. Toshiko Mori and David Chipperfield designed stores for Miyake, and Frank Gehry did the New York flagship on Hudson Street. The late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, writing on the designer’s sway with this cohort, once compared Miyake to “a visual philosopher of modern movement, an architect of traveling light.”
The curator Antwaun Sargent first noticed the dramatically layered sweatpants in the art world. “Older, established women would wear them all the time.” Then Solange Knowles wore Pleats Please on tour for A Seat at the Table and cast the clothes in a different light.
“After a series of interviews and conversations with her, I went out and bought some of it,” Sargent says, adding that he owns three pairs of black pants, a matching tank, a long-sleeve shirt, a hoodie, and women’s harem pants, which he buys extra large. Now Homme Plissé is a staple of his “leisure look.”
Miyake, who was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and became one the most celebrated Japanese visionaries of the post–World War II era, remains in charge of his namesake business. His fascination with pleats developed in the late ’80s, about a decade after the inception of his studio, when he found a scarf that had been folded into a zigzag shape.
What appeared to be a tiny, folded piece of fabric was actually a sculptural three--dimensional object when opened up. Four years of research went into developing a technique by which ultralight polyester is cut and sewn—it requires three times the volume of material to create the final shape—and then heat-pleated so the garment retains its form even after it’s been in the washing machine.
Along the way Miyake tested the collection with the Frankfurt Ballet Company; the choreographer William Forsythe used Pleats Please prototypes as costumes for 1991’s The Loss of Small Detail, and he loved the way they enveloped the dancers’ bodies and enhanced their movement. In 1993 Pleats Please was introduced as its own collection within the Miyake universe. The seemingly simple geometric shapes come in a palette of radiant graphic colors and prints that change every season. The collection became very popular for travel—ball it up in a suitcase and it comes out looking the way it should. Homme Plissé was launched 20 years later.
Artists have collaborated on the collection, including Tim Hawkinson, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Yasumasa Morimura, whose work with Miyake is now on view as part of an exhibit at the Museum at FIT in New York. Pleats Please was featured in the 1996 Florence Biennale, and the line’s spare yet bold and often humorous ad campaigns have been handled by giants of Japanese graphic design, such as the late Ikko Tanaka and Taku Satoh, the Japanese art director who rendered the clothes as colorful faces and even as pieces of sushi for campaigns that played to Pleats Please’s tenets: compressable, playful, and colorful.
The legendary fashion critic Suzy Menkes may be identifiable in the front row as much for her trademark pouf of hair as for her purple Pleats Please, but these clothes have always attracted those who love design more than fashion. That may explain why they have recently caught on with a new generation of the style-obsessed, including Knowles, Elle Decor editor-in-chief Asad Syrkett, the basket-ball player Russell Westbrook, and two-time Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali. A Miyake printed jumpsuit even made an appearance on HBO Max’s And Just Like That, worn by the Upper East Side mom played by Nicole Ari Parker. At the 2022 Grammy Awards in April, both Joni Mitchell and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo sported Pleats looks.
Earlier, Miyake was everywhere during Art Basel Miami Beach in December, specifically at Louis Vuitton’s tribute show to Virgil Abloh. “I swear to you, more of the men had on Issey Miyake than had on Louis Vuitton, which I found funny, because it used to be such a niche, art world sort of thing,” Sargent says.
The pandemic also saw a sales boost for the collection, the brand says, as people elevated their stay-at-home comfort fits. This no doubt delighted Miyake, who shared in a Taschen monograph that he came up with the name based on the words “pleasing pleats.”
“Pleats Please are ‘just clothes,’ ” he said. “I always believed clothes should be anonymous. I don’t even care if people recognize them as mine. Nevertheless, even if they are products, they must bestow freedom on those who wear them.”
De Cárdenas is living proof that Miyake is right: “You’re not feeling great when your jeans are too tight at the waist and you’re rocking a muffin top, but with Pleats Please you don’t have to. They have elastic.”
Lead photograph by Allie Holloway. From top right: Alexander Calder brooch; Fendi handbag ($1,590); Loewe sandals.
This story appears in the April 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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