It is rehearsal day for Japanese designer Issey Miyake and the 61-year-old fashion innovator is pumped. This is his first Tokyo fashion show in five years and he’s keen to share his new concept in DIY clothing: ‘A revolutionary idea called A-POC’ – an abbreviation of A Piece of Cloth – writes Tamsan Blanchard in the Observer Magazine on 25 April 1999. ‘He has not been so excited about one of his own products since Pleats Please was launched in 1993.’
For Miyake’s Paris show the previous autumn, an A-POC – a single strip of fabric – was ‘transformed into a capsule wardrobe before our very eyes,’ gasps Blanchard. ‘Lengths of white fabric were laid out on the floor and a small team of assistants set to work with their scissors. A snip here, a snip there and voilà! A pair of knickers… More scissor work and there was a bra top.’ A skirt, hat, socks and more besides followed: one piece of fabric, one capsule wardrobe. The message: yes, you can try this at home!
‘I’m not interested in selling myself,’ Miyake confides, adding that he sometimes observes his customers in the Pleats Please store on London’s Brook Street. They are nice people, ‘ordinary’. For his part, ‘I never tried to be like a superstar or a famous designer. The only thing I wanted was to be very proud of what I’m doing.’
He wasn’t proud of himself back when ‘his clothes were beginning to look more at home in a textiles gallery than on the woman in the street’. Following one Paris show, he realised he’d forgotten the importance of everyday life, so he got himself a rucksack, some underwear and a toothbrush and went to Greece. He hand-washed the underwear, took stock. Three years later, in 1988, functional, affordable Pleats Please was born.
The A-POC retails in the UK for £470. Too high, and Miyake knows it. Fashion victims are not his target market. ‘I’m not interested in high-maintenance women who take one hour for hair, one hour to dress, one hour for makeup. Disaster!’
