Issey Miyake:Photo Irving Penn

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As a child, Miyake wanted to be an athlete. One of the exhibits in the show is the official uniform he designed for the newly independent Lithuanian team for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Linked with his love of sport, Miyake’s clothes have always allowed freedom of movement, and his shows highlight their flexibility (and often bounce-ability).

According to Lidewij Edelkoort, the fashion predictions guru who runs the company Trend Union, Miyake is the past, present and future of fashion. “How creative can one person be?” she asks. “It is exceptional for a living person to have this body of work. There is a consistency in taste, colour, shape, yet evolving innovation, and always this keen interest in textiles.” Happily I have a great team of designers, so I am free to exploreWhere he found restriction, he challenged it. In 1960, while Miyake was a graphic design student, the World Design Conference came to Japan for the first time. The event brought together the most significant names in design – but nothing on fashion. Miyake was outraged and confronted the organiser. From the start, he turned his attention to clothing and was its greatest advocate. Body of work: part of the current Miyake Issey Exhibition at the National Art Centre Tokyo. Photograph: Masaya Yoshimura/The Irving Penn Foundation Before any collection makes it to Paris, everything is presented to Miyake himself at the studio’s somi (“general see”). Changes are sometimes made, but Miyake’s guiding hand is gentle and generous. “I always tell them that they don’t need me,” he says. “But I have to make sure that there is a concept with universal appeal. The work isn’t complete unless someone wears it. Also, I consider the somi a process of studying and learning – for myself. It’s crucial that the designers are establishing their own ideas.” The pair met in Tokyo over dinner, after an introduction by a mutual friend, the publisher Nicholas Callaway. In 1986 Penn started to shoot Miyake’s seasonal collections in New York, resulting in advertising campaigns, exhibitions, and publications. But these outputs were not the principal intention; they were the mere fruits of a long-distance creative exchange between the two.

A star-like creation for Issey Miyake during the 1999-2000 autumn-winter ready-to-wear collections. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/EPA The Tokyo exhibit will include large-scale projections of Penn’s collection photographs, an animated film by Pascal Roulin with original drawings by Michael Crawford, Issey Miyake collection posters being exhibited as a group for the first time, and original fine-art prints made by Penn, along with his preliminary drawings for photographing Miyake’s designs. Penn shot for Vogue, where the clothing should be shown in a very formal way, but in our case he was completely free,” recalls Kitamura, who was putting finishing touches to the exhibition when I meet her. “Each time it was a challenge to do something Issey would find stimulating.” Tradition is very important to Miyake. It is the fusion of the most basic of materials and ancient of traditions with new and innovative techniques that has kept his brand at the forefront of fashion – technically if not always critically – for the past four and a half decades. One of his biggest fans was the late Zaha Hadid, who loved wearing his clothes.

He’s always been a free spirit with his own way of working – at his own pace. “It’s different from the collections that happen every six months. Tradition takes time, but that’s something I am very interested in now.” Kitamura has been Miyake’s right-hand woman (she is now president of the company) since the mid-70s. It was her job to select pieces for the exhibition from thousands in their archive. She says that Miyake kept everything from the beginning, anticipating, perhaps, their importance.

In 1950–51, inspired by old prints of street criers, Penn began a series of photographs depicting representatives of the Small Trades in Paris, London, and New York. The project began in Paris, where he was assisted in the selection of subjects by French Vogue editor Edmonde Charles-Roux and photographer Robert Doisneau. Penn's reflections on the tradespeople:In 1973, he began to show in Paris, distinctively different from other Japanese designers arriving there. His regular collections of sculptured, high-end clothes were spectacular, but the real fun came with a change of focus to volume production ready-to-wear lines through the 1990s. They brought him nearer his ideal, unfashiony customers. Although Issey Miyake and the legendary photographer Irving Penn came from vastly different worlds and cultures, they were responsible for one of the most creative unions in fashion, one equally as iconic as Helmut Newton’s erotically charged photograph of YSL’s “Le Smoking” tuxedo, or more recently Juergen Teller’s skewed take on the aesthetic of Marc Jacobs. This month, the 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT cultural centre in Tokyo launches Irving Penn And Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue – a stunning document of their 13- year collaboration. Miyake came to define a radical Japanese aesthetic that shook up the fashion status quo in the 1980s and 90s. Make me a fabric that looks like poison.’ This is what Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake apparently once instructed his textile engineer, Makiko Minagawa. Miyake’s idea of fashion was often beautiful and always technically challenging. Over a career spanning four decades, his work would demonstrate an extraordinarily virtuosic range, from red plastic moulded bustiers with flirtatiously flared peplums to colour faded menswear drawing on shibori, a traditional Japanese tie-dye technique. He designed multicoloured flying saucer dresses that could be compressed like paper lanterns to fit into a suitcase and tubular industrial knits that the wearer could cut to size along a dotted line. Most importantly, perhaps, Miyake pioneered an innovative method of heat-pressed pleating that would become his distinctive fashion signature. His clothes were joyful and the news of his death, aged 84, marks the loss of a great twentieth-century fashion visionary. The late Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake held a rare appreciation for the role of image-making in design creativity. His longstanding working relationship with the photographer Irving Penn, whom he called Penn-san, is testament to Miyake’s understanding of how he could regard his work anew, by looking at it through the creative eye of another.

But the secret of Miyake’s success (his business is still privately owned, with 133 stores in Japan and 91 internationally, plus eight lines of clothing and bags, as well as fragrances, lights and watches) is not that he has embraced technology, more that he has managed to use it in a way that fuses the innovative – the industrial and the digital – with the most elemental of crafts. In 2007 he launched his Reality Lab. “It’s quite amazing to see Japanese technology,” he says. “We develop many different things, but happily I have a great team of designers. I am going to let them get on with it, and this way I can be free to explore.” At the exhibition opening Miyake was presented with the cross of the Commander of the Légion d’honneur (an award he shares with Karl Lagerfeld who was given it in 2010). He didn’t come out to the celebration dinner, preferring a quiet night in. But I heard he wore his medal for the rest of the night, no doubt dreaming of his next challenge, how to make the world a better place using that most fundamental of materials, paper.Miyake anticipated sustainability issues in the industry long before they were a talking point. I ask him what he thinks the key challenges will be for future generations of fashion designers. “We may have to go through a thinning process,” he says, meaning that we may have to consume less. “This is important. In Paris we call the people who make clothing couturiers – they develop new clothing items – but actually the work of designing is to make something that works in real life.”