The Great Fashion Designers (31 page)

Speaking to Susannah Frankel of
The Guardian
in 1997, he described his first half-hour show in Tokyo thus: ‘There was no music, just a sound system that picked up every little noise. The girl came out in many layers of clothing. She take off her shoes, throws them down. Bang! Bang! She take off garment. Ssh. She drop it on floor. Crash! She take off everything. She has no clothes. End of show. It become big Tokyo scandal. Sponsorship company beg me to stop.'

Miyake has a talent for the small scandals that get big headlines. In 1976 he showed his collection in Tokyo on ‘Twelve Black Girls,' led out by Grace Jones. In the 1980s in Paris he showed his collection on dancers and volunteers of all ages and genders, culminating in the 1995 show starring a group of octogenarians. His collaborations with artists—such as Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang among others—and the beauty of his exhibitions are legendary. Simply because they make such extraordinary pictures, the great photographer, Irving Penn, volunteered in 1986 to shoot all of Miyake's collections—something he did with no interference from the designer for a decade. Miyake has claimed that seeing what Penn made of his clothes enabled him to understand his own designs more acutely. He has been given major shows in the greatest museums and galleries in Japan, America, France and Britain but making real clothes for everyone has always been at the heart of his work.

He created Pleats Please in 1993, the year he was made a member of the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest accolade. A-POC (a piece of cloth) was the similarly egalitarian ‘cut-and-wear from a tube of fabric' system he developed and launched in 1999.

Miyake told Frankel:

My first dream, and why I decided to open my studio was that I thought to myself, ‘If I could one day make clothes like T-shirts and jeans, I would be very excited.' But the more I worked the more I felt so far away from doing so. I was always doing such heavy things, far away from the people. And then I was thinking, you know, ‘Are you stupid? Don't you remember why you started designing in the first place?' And then I thought, ‘OK, Pleats Please.' So I started to think how to make it, how to wash it, how to coordinate it, even how to pack it. And I worked on how to keep the price down.

Pleats had long been a theme to which Miyake returned in his main collection, and now he developed a separate collection, chiefly in machine-washable feather-light, uncreasable viscose, of simple, useful, comfortable pieces pleated vertically, horizontally, diagonally, cross-hatched, straight and wriggly that made interesting shapes on the body and often could be worn several ways. As Richard Martin and Harold Koda wrote in their catalogue to the 1994 Orientalism exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, ‘Hybrid styles by such designers as … Issey Miyake offer the paradigm of dress that cannot be located to a specific place but justly belong to the world.'

Though he handed over the design side of the main line to Naoki Takizawa in 1999, Miyake continues to work on Pleats Please, and his style and influence are apparent in the company's products. In 2007, a new creative director was appointed, Dai Fujiwara, after Takizawa left to form his own label.

Further reading:
See Mark Holborn's
Issey Miyake
(1995) and, for background, Claire Wilcox's
Radical Fashion
(2001).

Like all the great designers who helped to shift fashion on to a new track, Geoffrey Beene challenged accepted criteria. His area of greatest experimentation was fabric. He was an early champion of postwar synthetics, often in the pursuit of that holy grail of women who do not have ladies' maids or unlimited funds for dry-cleaning—uncreasable fabrics. A democrat both in terms of the modern lifestyle he assumed his customers led and in his refusal to accept ancien régime rules of dress or hierarchies of materials, Beene was a key exponent of the American sportswear style, a wearer-focused fashion concept which embraced the utilitarian and practical aspects of clothing and undermined all the conventions about what one could wear when and all the demarcation lines about appropriate fabrics.

Typically, American fashion rejects the distinctions between what should be worn by day and what by night, the kind of ‘never wear diamonds before 6 p.m.' rigidity which permitted the dowagers who ran society to spot a parvenu at 100 paces. Beene instinctively pursued a youthful customer who cared as little as he did for all those shibboleths. He was, as Jane Mulvagh, has observed, a leg man. ‘His clothes,' she wrote, ‘were easy, flirty and showed legs, legs, legs.'

While never compromising on quality of cut, structure or couture-standard technique, Beene played with mischievous juxtapositions: metallic lamé teamed with grey flannel, cashmere knit and taffeta, blanket-plaid wool and lace. He was one of the earliest American designers to introduce baby doll looks as well as gypsy styles and traditional ethnic fabrics, including simple cottons previously thought down-market. In the 1980s, when opulence was the order of the day, some of Beene's most enchanting evening designs were the result of taking a conventional daywear style—a shirtwaist dress, say—growing it to floor-length, and then outlining and encrusting the luscious print in sequins and beads.

Harold Koda, the celebrated curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, told Brenda Cullerton, ‘It's like someone who speaks the English language and through use becomes a poet. His affinity, his exploration of the abstraction of cloth, has allowed him to push its possibilities in ways that are unimaginable.'

Beene, who identified with the Pygmalion myth, said, in 1995:

Clothes should look as if they haven't been born yet; as if a woman were born into them. It's a form of possession, this belonging of one to the other. You mould a woman into what you perceive her as being. What I do is the product of my admiration. I imagine women in an idyllic state. I create a vision of this woman, whether she exists or not. Doesn't every human aim for perfection? For the possibility of it?

At the heart of designer sportswear is the client, an active woman with a busy life and a need for comfortable, useful, easy clothes with pockets. The history of the style has two strands of antecedents: firstly, Parisian and American couture and conventional menswear for all occasions, formal tailoring to leisurewear, and secondly, Seventh Avenue, the
commercial, factory-based heart of the American fashion industry which, like all of America's late nineteenth and twentieth century industries, was almost obsessively focused on modernism (the modern movement mantra, ‘less is more' was to come to apply to Beene's work), on speed, practicality and the constant development and updating that fuelled consumerism. Industrial America has always been about hard-selling the latest thing, about whetting the consumers' appetites, about an egalitarian emphasis on mass availability. In terms of clothing, the early sportswear designers—Claire McCardell, Vera Maxwell, Tom Brigance, Anne Fogarty, Tina Lesser, Bonnie Cashin, Halston—embraced a kind of version of Italian Futurism, an art movement whose exponents liked to picture the world in constant motion. These were the first designers to envisage women striding out rather than remaining languidly at rest. Arguably, they saw it not in terms of feminism but in terms of modernity, liberty and the American way. Beene, talking to Brenda Cullerton in 1995, defined beauty as ‘a measure of energy'.

‘I have never much liked rigid clothes or anything constraining,' Geoffrey Beene told Brenda Polan in an interview in 1984. ‘I like freedom. I am an American; I love freedom and the brilliant clothes that are the American working uniform. I love sweatshirts, skirts and loafers, denim, baggy chinos, and I have never in my work deviated from the premise of freedom and effortlessness.' Indeed in 1968 he famously designed full-length evening dresses based on the American football shirt and sequinned all over.

His experimental, almost transgressive, approach to fabric made him attractive to the manufacturers of the new synthetic fibres that became an important part of the development of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he was one of ten international designers commissioned by DuPont to contribute to a promotional project for Qiana, a silky nylon yarn. He chose to have the yarn woven into a satin velour
découpé
about which he said, ‘Working with this material proved to me that synthetics could be perfected, for it was exactly like a pure silk velour, only it did not crease.' He was disappointed in the long run by the way these fabrics decayed in his archive.

Geoffrey Beene was born in 1927 in Haynesville, Louisiana, and he was never to lose that warm, melting molasses-over-ice-cream accent. There was also a formality to his diction that may have been dated but which was a joy to the ears of the literate. To call him a Southern gentleman is a cliché—and, anyway, he could be the most irascible and impatient of conversationalists, something of which even his biographer, Brenda Cullerton, complained. But he was cultivated, erudite and gently reared. The grandson of a plantation owner on one side and the town doctor on the other, one of his early sketches showed him attended by black manservant. He first demonstrated his interest in fashion as a boy by redecorating his room and getting his aunts to make up a fabric he bought—tiny orange flowers on a powder blue background—into beach pyjamas using a Simplicity paper pattern. A passion for the way cloth worked with the body was all he took away from three years in the medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans. ‘Cadavers were the moment of truth,' he said. He wanted to cut for the body, not into it, and sketched movie star gowns on the margins of his copy of Gray's Anatomy.

He dropped out, spent three asthmatic, hospitalised weeks in the US Army, was discharged, moved to California to stay with an aunt in the movie business and took a temporary job in the display department of I Magnin in Los Angeles. ‘I didn't leave the South,' he said in 1995. ‘I fled. I'm still fleeing.' In 1947 he moved to New York to the Traphagen School of Fashion, to study the theory and practice of design, before taking a course at L'Académie Julien in Paris and apprenticing himself to a tailor who had worked for Molyneux. Tailoring is at the heart of his technique, and his love affair with geometry, especially triangles, probably had is origins here. ‘My life began there,' he told Cullerton. ‘It began the moment people understood what I wanted to do.' In 1951, he returned to the Seventh Avenue garment trade and worked anonymously for several houses before being fired by stylistically conservative Harmay Fashions for a collection considered dangerously avant-garde in that it featured a chemise dress. He joined Teal Traina in 1954, where he was given the freedom to do original designs rather than following Paris at a year's remove, staying
until 1963 when, with backing from two partners, he launched his own label.

The company was successful from the start and Beene won his first three Coty Awards in his first five years in business. His first collection was already confidently Beene. The
Dallas Times Herald
reported, ‘There was gingham, like a tablecloth, embroidered with the surprise of henna sequins …' And later in the same article, ‘Here within the framework of a lean, supple streak of a dress, he has created real fashion excitement because, when he couldn't find a fabric he wanted, he invented it himself.' He became known for dresses that were lightly detailed but firmly structured—pretty body armour, such as the wedding dress for President Lyndon Johnson's daughter Lynda Bird in 1968. They sold well and were much copied (he resented imitation and worried about it endlessly). Some critics instinctively disliked what they saw as an archaic insistence on structure—a tailored formality just like the Paris-inspired crispness of the little suits and dresses worn by Jackie Kennedy. Beene's were criticised, notably by Kennedy Fraser, who described them in
The New Yorker
in 1972 as ‘concrete'.

Beene himself was later to dismiss these pieces from his early period as ‘uptight little dresses which hid all my misgivings'. In the catalogue to his retrospective
25 Years in Fashion
exhibition in 1988, he called them ‘Superstructures', adding, ‘They were so stiff they could stand up by themselves.' They were, he reckoned, a last sentimental tribute to all he had learned of French couture in Paris. He entered a period of experimentation, exploring techniques to enable cloth to move over and with the body—curved and industrial-weight zippers, spiral seams in none of the usual places, inserts of lace and chiffon, lingerie straps, and the use of synthetics, including the strangely popular faux suede. He protested, ‘They work; they don't wrinkle; they take less care.'

The revised Beene style—'clean, clear and strong' as his late-1960s assistant, Issey Miyake, described it—was never a mass-market hit; his customers were women who had the sophisticated understanding to match his own—Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Kennedy. The daring work was subsidised by a cheaper line, Beene Bag, introduced in 1974, and by royalties from discreet licensing deals for men's shirts and colognes. He never aspired to be a big brand, admitting, ‘I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist, I never think about money—beautiful things make money.'