Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, famed for pleated clothing style, dies of cancer at 84

Japanese designer Issey Miyake, who built one of Japan’s biggest fashion brands and was known for his boldly sculpted, signature pleated pieces, has died of cancer at 84 years of age on August 5, Japanese media reports said Tuesday. 

According to AP report, Miyake was responsible for defining an era in Japan’s modern history, reaching stardom in the 1970s among a generation of designers and artists who reached global fame by defining a Japanese vision that was unique from the Western sensibilities. Miyake’s origami-like pleats transformed usually crass polyester into chic and his use of computer technology in weaving to create apparel and his down-to-earth clothing was meant to celebrate the human body regardless of race, build, size or age, the AP report said.

The Japanese designer was famed for his pleated style of clothing that would never wrinkle and he produced the signature black turtleneck of friend and Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs, according to Reuters report. Miyake, whose name became a byword for Japan's economic and fashion prowess in the 1980s, died of liver cancer, Kyodo news agency said. 

Miyake was well known for his practicality and is said to have wanted to become either a dancer or an athlete before reading his sister's fashion magazines inspired him to change direction - with those original interests believed to be behind the freedom of movement his clothing permits, the Reuters report said.

The report further informed that the Japanese designer was born in Hiroshima and was seven years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city while he was in a classroom and was reluctant to speak of the event in later life. Notably, in 2009, writing in the New York Times as part of a campaign to get then-U.S. President Barack Obama to visit the city, he said he did not want to be labelled as "the designer who survived" the bomb, the Reuters report said.

Miyake developed more than a dozen fashion lines ranging from his main Issey Miyake for men and women to bags, watches and fragrances before essentially retiring in 1997 to devote himself to research and in 2016, when asked what he thought were the challenges facing future designers, he indicated to the UK's Guardian newspaper that people were likely to be consuming less, the Reuters report said.

(With inputs from AP, Reuters, Kyodo news agency)