Irving Penn on Issey Miyake

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While fashion photography remained Penn's primary source of income, during the 1940s and '50s, he also ventured into portraiture, especially the group portrait, a genre that offered "a welcome balance to the fashion diet at Vogue". Ballet Theater and The Twelve Most Photographed Models (both from 1947) demonstrate his early mastery of the genre. In 1953, Penn opened his own studio devoted to advertising and commercial photography, and other side projects.

Holme, Bryan, Katharine Tweed, Jessica Daves, and Alexander Liberman. The World in Vogue. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Jodidio, Philip. "No. 500 (Twenty artists and architects each contribute a recent work to the 500th issue of Connaissance des Arts)." Connaissance des Arts no. 500 (November 1993): 68–97. I told the people at the home to which I had been evacuated, “I want to go home,” and they gave me lots of hard, dry biscuits. I headed home alone to search for my mother. Mr. Miyake’s “Flying Saucer” dress, on display in 2020 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times As a student in the 1960s, Miyake admired Irving Penn’s photographic work in Vogue. “When I saw Penn’s photographs, it was clear that they went much further,” Miyake said in the 1999 book about their collaboration. “I realize that he is the most remarkable photographer who looks at clothes with a completely different eye. And I wanted to undertake something with him.” They began working together in 1986 and had produced almost 250 photos by 1999. Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Portraits (exhibition catalogue). London: National Portrait Gallery, 2010.

Still, he was perhaps best known as a designer whose styles combined the discipline of fashion with technology and art. In 2000, he introduced another collection designed to simplify the making of clothes, to eliminate the need for cutting and sewing the fabric. With his concept “A Piece of Cloth,” or “A-POC,” a single thread could be fed into an industrial knitting or weaving machine programmed by a computer. In a single process, the machine formed the components of a fully finished outfit, extruded as a single tube of fabric. The clothes could be cut with scissors along lines of demarcation. One tube of fabric could produce a dress, a hat and a blouse. Snip the fabric, and a piece of clothing emerged. Many critics around the world have independently reached the conclusion that Issey Miyake is not a fashion designer. “He calls his activity ‘making things,’” clarifies curator Angelo Flaccavento, positioning Miyake above the tug-of-war between practicality and style that characterizes fashion design. Instead, what distinguishes his work is an incurable optimism (expressed above in a photo shoot for his spring-summer 1976 collection), and the designer has adopted the mind-set itself as a way to describe his vocation—which is especially convenient because one of the Japanese words for clothing also has positive connotations. “We have three words: yofuku, which means Western clothing; wafuku, which means Japanese clothing; and fuku, which means clothing,” Miyake told Time magazine in 1986. “[Fuku] can also mean good fortune, a kind of happiness. People ask me what I do. I don’t say yofuku or wafuku. I say I make happiness.” — A.R. Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (exhibition catalogue). Poughkeepsie, New York: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2019: 120, illustrated.Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers, Morgan Library and Museum, New York, January 18–April 13, 2008. Like his slightly younger contemporary Richard Avedon, who worked alongside him at Vogue in the 1960s and '70s, Penn stands on the shoulders of two great mentors who transformed fashion photography. Alexey Brodovich, Penn's art school teacher and subsequent employer at Harper's Bazaar, and Alexei Liberman, editor in chief at Vogue, were both Russian emigres steeped in avant-garde culture. Penn internalized their ideas and executed them in radical compositions. They in turn gave Penn and a handful of other great photographers unprecedented license to explore unorthodox concepts in fashion photography, developing a unique style akin to those of Modern artists. Thornton, Gene. "Irving Penn—The Dangers of The Painterly Approach." The New York Times (September 5, 1982). A-PoC Le Feu, by Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, 1999, an example of Miyake’s A-PoC (A Piece of Cloth) concept – extruded tubular fabric that wearers could cut out into seamless garments. Photograph: Yasuaki Yoshinaga/A-PoC Le Feu, Issey Miyake Born in 1938, Miyake grew up in a Japan devastated by WWII, and his world was subsequently shaped by the clash of eastern and western cultures. After moving to Paris in 1965, he studied at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture – working at Guy Laroche and Givenchy (and a short stint in New York at Geoffrey Beene) – before forming his own studio in 1970. Endlessly fascinated by the space between the human body and the clothes that encase it, Miyake frequently experimented with new fabrics and silhouettes – folding clothes in an origami-like style, or extending them far beyond the confines of the body.

And just like the abstract look of Miyake’s fashion lines, the models would strike a variety of abstract poses. Some even insist that it was Irving Penn’s work with Miyake that inspired Madonna’s 1990 song “Vogue”. Nihon Buyo I seem to be present at occasions of great social change,” he was quoted as saying in the 2017 book “Where Did Issey Come From?” by Kazuko Koike. “Paris in May ’68, Beijing at Tiananmen, New York on 9/11. Like a witness to history.” After his return to New York in 1946, Penn worked with other fashion and home magazines as well as Vogue, juggling fashion, portraiture, and ethnographic photography. Photographing indigenous peoples in their natural surroundings had long been a dream of Penn's. On Vogue's dime, he travelled to Spain, Peru, Bangladesh, Hawaii, Manila, The Philippines, India, and other exotic locations for fashion shoots. On these occasions, he also completed personal projects. Dancer: 1999, Nudes by Irving Penn, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 17–June 16, 2002. Traveled to: as Irving Penn Nudes, Art Institute of Chicago, June 1–October 6, 2002; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, September 18–October 20, 2002.Portraits from the Museum’s Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 4–July 5,1960. Reinstalled: July 6–September 18, 1960. Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Cranium Architecture (exhibition catalogue). New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1988. Feliciano, Kristina. “Penn and the Ultimate Product Shot.” Photo District News 20, 11 (November 2000): 66–69. Callaway, Nicholas and Irving Penn. Issey Miyake: Photographs by Irving Penn. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1988. Miyake believes that you have to learn from fabric every single time you use a new one: “The better you know it, the more you keep learning,” he said. “The weight, the body, the fall of the fabric all determine what it will eventually be made into.” Miyake sees that it is the designer’s job to work with manufacturers to create clothes from materials in such a way that those who wear them have “the freedom of expression and its resulting joy.” — P.M.