NYLON - January 2009 - (Page 84) objets dʼart IT’S NOT EASY BEING A VISIONARY, BUT FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES, ISSEY MIYAKE HAS BEEN JUST THAT. BY CELIA ELLENBERG In the early ’90s, Issey Miyake was something of a demigod. If you didn’t know and love him for his groundbreaking Pleats Please Issey Miyake line (the crinkle-cut miracle fabric that started popping up in shirt-, dress-, pants-, and general wardrobe–enhancing form on the fashion savvy across the globe), you were definitely familiar with his first foray into fragrance. An aquatic floral, L’eau d’Issey came at a time when designer perfumes were status symbols, indicative of personality as much as olfactory preference: clean-cut jocks favored Davidoff’s Cool Water; arty, ambiguous types chose Calvin Klein’s CK One; and the more hoity members of the style set bathed in Thierry Mugler’s Angel. But L’eau d’Issey offered a point of difference in the saturated market. Meant to smell like the scent of water on skin, it was clean, fresh, and unlike, say, Mugler’s Angel, didn’t leave a palpable waft of patchouli in its wake. Even its bottle was refreshing, a frosted glass cone that became iconic despite the fact that is was actually a stand-in for the original packaging created by famed Japanese artist Shiro Kuramata (Kuramata’s bottle was deemed too expensive to produce, so they went with the more affordable, but still sleek, cone), whose design finally hits stores in limited quantities this holiday season. The fragrance seemed to embody the very idea of “fashion forward”—a conceptual muse that has driven the designer and his many creative pursuits for the past clockwise from top left: a piece from miyake’s a-poc line; another cut-from-the-same-cloth dress from a-poc; an ad for miyake’s pleats please line; the original l’eau d’issey fragrance; the man, the legend. 84 hall of fame all images courtesy of issey miyake parfums.
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