Designer Ronan Bouroullec on his vibrant collaboration with Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

The curving white partitions of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo had been hung with a collection of clothes adorned with the instinctive, summary drawings of Ronan Bouroullec, the multidisciplinary designer and artist who creates these works as a part of his every day observe (his device is a set of Japanese felt-tip pens).

They offered the backdrop for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s newest menswear present, which featured the assorted items within the assortment itself, in addition to inspiring its temper. Issey Miyake referred to as it a ’inventive session’ somewhat than a collaboration, an change of concepts constructed on Bouroullec’s earlier relationship with the Issey Miyake model (in 2000, he designed the inside of Issey Miyake’s A-POC retailer in Paris alongside his brother Erwan).

Ronan Bouroullec’s ‘inventive session’ with Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

This isn’t to say that he jumped instantly on the alternative, having been famously reticent to see these designs used on clothes or materials up to now (although final yr, he collaborated with Kvadrat on a collection of textiles which recalled the traces and textures of the items, which he largely sees as private and meditative). ‘It’s like a path that you just stroll on daily basis till you arrive. You see whenever you’ve arrived, however you don’t keep in mind what occurred whilst you had been strolling,’ he instructed Wallpaper* on the time.

‘I’ve all the time had loads of requests from style manufacturers, and I all the time say no,’ Bouroullec says. ’I really feel like style makes use of issues, after which it goes within the rubbish so rapidly. However Issey Miyake is completely different, I do know it as a model. If something, they began off being too respectful: I instructed them ”I don’t need you to be well mannered with me”. I needed to see one thing recent, the place they weren’t seen as an ornamental object however a part of the design.’

Certainly, the ensuing assortment captured the artist’s intuitive strategy with silhouettes wrapped across the physique in vibrant layers and prospers of Bouroullec’s work showing all through. A collection of uneven scarves, in the meantime, recalled the artist’s expressive, summary motifs. The gathering notes stated that it was an exploration of how inventive materials (right here, Bouroullec’s drawings) will be translated into clothes.

‘All of the members of the design workforce are drawn to his work,’ a spokesperson for the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake workforce tells me backstage on the present. ’We predict there’s one thing actually poetic and exquisite about it – you don’t simply take a look at the paintings, you might be imagining your self diving into it. It was a inventive, and galvanizing, session for us. I feel the scarves seize the essence of the gathering – one of many design workforce members had the thought of truly carrying the drawings.’

’It’s been extraordinarily fascinating as a result of it’s prefer it’s like rising or constructing an exhibition or portray, color after color,’ says Bouroullec. ’All for simply fifteen minutes on the runway – it’s extraordinary.’