Contained in the kaleidoscopic debut of Issey Miyake’s IM Males in Paris

In the summertime of 1977, seven years after founding his namesake label, the Japanese designer Issey Miyake staged a runway present in Tokyo and Kyoto titled ‘Fly with Issey Miyake’. Held on a cross-shaped stage, fashions wore items from the designer’s A/W 1977 assortment whereas brandishing parachute-like items of material in Miyake’s daring, liberated prints. Proven over 5 performances a day, 22,000 folks would view the spectacle, which was a part of a collaboration with Japanese division retailer Parco. ‘It’s legendary amongst Issey Miyake employees,’ says designer Sen Kawahara, one-third of the trio behind IM Males, an offshoot of the Miyake Design Studio which launched in 2021 (his co-designers are Yuki Itakura and Nobutaka Kobayashi).

Contained in the debut of Issey Miyake’s IM Males

Kawahara is talking at a preview of IM Males’s A/W 2025 assortment, which was proven as a part of Paris Vogue Week Males’s earlier right this moment (23 January 2025). Marking the label’s debut present in Paris, IM Males will exchange Issey Miyake Homme Plissé – one other one of many roster of manufacturers below the Miyake Design Studio umbrella – on the menswear schedule (‘we’ve made new plans for Homme Plissé because it strikes ahead and continues to evolve,’ learn a current assertion from the model). Already well-liked in Japan, and now accessible in various worldwide Issey Miyake shops, IM Males appears to be like primed to step into the highlight. ‘I needed to take what Issey Miyake was doing together with his girls’s line, and inherit that, and transfer it into the long run,’ says Kawahara of the label, which stays sure by ‘the philosophy of a bit of material’ – the identical philosophy at centre of Miyake’s fabric-first method.

The A/W 2025 assortment, offered this morning at former convent Le Réfectoire des Cordeliers, is titled ‘Fly with IM Males’, a reference to the 1977 present. Kawahara says he and his co-designers had been fascinated by the thought of a bit of material floating within the wind: ‘each time a bit of material, one finds unbounded creativity, manifested throughout the unfilled area, remodeling and able to take flight,’ learn the gathering notes. ‘We needed to return to the start, to return to one thing easy and delightful,’ says Kawahara, of why the opening part of the present featured monochromatic appears to be like. ‘I visualised piece of material, flying away. The primary color I considered was white.’

Certainly, the thought of simplicity runs via IM Males’s output, which regularly sees clothes constructed from a single sq. of material which, when folded into place with poppers, buttons or zips, turns into a jacket, shirt or coat, in more and more complicated methods. On this assortment, there’s a metallic ultrasuede bomber which seems like a leather-based jacket and but may be folded solely flat when the zips are undone (the identical goes for a extra voluminous coat, lower from perforated ultrasuede, which right here is 100 per cent plant-based in an innovation developed by Toray Industries, Inc which makes use of sugar molasses and cornstarch). Itakura, after demonstrating these magic-trick-like items previous to the present, says that working this fashion – a nod to Miyake’s ‘a bit of material’, which prizes material above all else – is pleasurable in its strictures. ‘[We enjoy] the problem of how flat items may be made into shapes on the physique,’ he says. ‘Every thing comes again to this concept of one thing having to return out of a bit of material. That’s the way in which we wish to work.’

Within the present itself, which was offered on an optic-white runway, cleverly layered and draped appears to be like – some looped across the head in monastic vogue – appeared in a kaleidoscopic palette of colors, with daring hues of inexperienced, purple and yellow. On the present’s shut, fashions undid the clothes they had been carrying till they had been a single sq. of fabric, earlier than brandishing them like flags and dashing alongside the runway. The present was backdropped by an set up by Japanese artist and designer Tokujin Yoshioka, that includes monumental black squares moved round by a collection of robotic arms.