Issey Miyake transforms the Cartier Foundation into living sculpture garden

PARIS -- As Paris wilted under the ruthless June sun, Issey Miyake sent out a battalion of intergalactic fashion soldiers at the Cartier Foundation Thursday, shimmering between art and menswear apparel in a spectacle where even the light was a player. The late-morning sun bounced sharply off the art museum's monumental steel pillars, forcing some guests to slide their seats to escape the dazzling reflections — an impromptu game of musical chairs set to a pulsing, kinetic soundtrack.

This Paris Fashion Week season finds the Miyake house in the midst of transition. In January, Paris bid adieu to Homme Plissé — Miyake’s pleated cult favorite that had anchored the city’s menswear calendar since 2019 — as the brand shifted its focus to nomadic shows, most recently appearing under the Tuscan sun. The torch in Paris has now been passed to IM Men, the last line personally conceived by Issey Miyake before his death in 2022. Thursday’s show marked IM Men’s return to the Paris stage, under the direction of designers Sen Kawahara, Yuki Itakura, and Nobutaka Kobayashi.

The theme, “Dancing Texture,” nodded to the ceramic artistry of Shoji Kamoda, but also to the surreal choreography on display. Models appeared to roll, tilt, and swing through the light, their movements somewhere between ballet and a slow-motion video game. Occasionally, a guest would squint, unsure if they were watching a runway show or a heat-induced hallucination.

The crowd — equal parts Parisian cool, visiting editors, and those for whom a pleated culotte is a spiritual calling — dodged the sun's glare and fanned themselves in the heat, shifting for both comfort and the best sightline. The first model glided out in a mad, angular hat, setting the tone for a parade of tin man-meets-space ninja silhouettes designed for dance floors or distant planets.

The clothes themselves looked as if they had been engineered for a new climate — or perhaps a new species. Surfaces peeled, rippled, and shimmered, metallic foils flashed against the sun, and jacquard weaves evoked the carved waves of Kamoda’s ceramics. Vermilion and white motifs burst forth alongside a near-neon green, courtesy of upcycled fishing nets. A coat unzipped into a dramatic collar while some blousons and pants, when laid flat, formed perfect circles — a wink at Kamoda’s wheel-thrown plates.

Miyake, who died in 2022, loomed large over the collection, his vision unmistakable in every engineered pleat and playful transformation. IM Men is the last line he conceived — a living laboratory for innovation, risk, and occasional absurdity, now energetically interpreted by a younger team. Even in his absence, his legacy is alive in every joke, fold, and jolt of surprise on the runway.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake rose from postwar Japan to become a global force, transforming fashion in the 1980s and ’90s with his radical, sculptural vision. He pioneered heat-set pleating and created lines like Pleats Please and A-POC that blurred the boundaries between art, science, and daily life. Miyake’s designs liberated fabric, allowing it to move with the body and imagination alike.

Of course, the fashion house’s embrace of the avant-garde still courts danger. Thursday's spectacle occasionally veered into excess, with kinetic art and sci-fi headgear that threatened to upstage the clothes themselves — a familiar Miyake risk. But the best moments, like a pared-back tangerine overcoat that floated past, proved restraint can sometimes steal the show.