Inside the kaleidoscopic debut of Issey Miyake’s IM Men in Paris

In the summer of 1977, seven years after founding his namesake label, the Japanese designer Issey Miyake staged a runway show in Tokyo and Kyoto titled ‘Fly with Issey Miyake’. Held on a cross-shaped stage, models wore pieces from the designer’s A/W 1977 collection while brandishing parachute-like pieces of fabric in Miyake’s bold, liberated prints. Shown over five performances a day, 22,000 people would view the spectacle, which was part of a collaboration with Japanese department store Parco. ‘It is legendary among Issey Miyake staff,’ says designer Sen Kawahara, one-third of the trio behind IM Men, an offshoot of the Miyake Design Studio which launched in 2021 (his co-designers are Yuki Itakura and Nobutaka Kobayashi).

Inside the debut of Issey Miyake’s IM Men

Kawahara is speaking at a preview of IM Men’s A/W 2025 collection, which was shown as part of Paris Fashion Week Men’s earlier today (23 January 2025). Marking the label’s debut show in Paris, IM Men will replace Issey Miyake Homme Plissé – another one of the roster of brands under the Miyake Design Studio umbrella – on the menswear schedule (‘we have made new plans for Homme Plissé as it moves forward and continues to evolve,’ read a recent statement from the brand). Already popular in Japan, and now available in a number of international Issey Miyake stores, IM Men looks primed to step into the spotlight. ‘I wanted to take what Issey Miyake was doing with his women’s line, and inherit that, and move it into the future,’ says Kawahara of the label, which remains bound by ‘the philosophy of a piece of cloth’ – the same philosophy at centre of Miyake’s fabric-first approach.

The A/W 2025 collection, presented this morning at former convent Le Réfectoire des Cordeliers, is titled ‘Fly with IM Men’, a reference to the 1977 show. Kawahara says he and his co-designers were thinking about the idea of a piece of fabric floating in the wind: ‘whenever looking at a piece of cloth, one finds unbounded creativity, manifested within the unfilled space, transforming and ready to take flight,’ read the collection notes. ‘We wanted to go back to the beginning, to go back to something simple and beautiful,’ says Kawahara, of why the opening section of the show featured monochromatic looks. ‘I visualised piece of cloth, flying away. The first colour I thought of was white.’

Indeed, the idea of simplicity runs through IM Men’s output, which often sees garments constructed from a single square of fabric which, when folded into place with poppers, buttons or zips, becomes a jacket, shirt or coat, in increasingly complex ways. In this collection, there is a metallic ultrasuede bomber which appears like a leather jacket and yet can be folded entirely flat when the zips are undone (the same goes for a more voluminous coat, cut from perforated ultrasuede, which here is 100 per cent plant-based in an innovation developed by Toray Industries, Inc which uses sugar molasses and cornstarch). Itakura, after demonstrating these magic-trick-like pieces prior to the show, says that working this way – a nod to Miyake’s ‘a piece of cloth’, which prizes fabric above all else – is enjoyable in its strictures. ‘[We enjoy] the challenge of how flat pieces can be made into shapes on the body,’ he says. ‘Everything comes back to this idea of something having to come out of a piece of cloth. That’s the way we want to work.’

In the show itself, which was presented on an optic-white runway, cleverly layered and draped looks – some looped around the head in monastic fashion – appeared in a kaleidoscopic palette of colours, with bold hues of green, purple and yellow. At the show’s close, models undid the garments they were wearing until they were a single square of material, before brandishing them like flags and dashing along the runway. The show was backdropped by an installation by Japanese artist and designer Tokujin Yoshioka, featuring enormous black squares moved around by a series of robotic arms.

After the show, the Le Réfectoire des Cordeliers show space will transform into an exhibition, providing a closer look at the ‘design and engineering’ behind five of the collection’s innovations. The idea is ‘to explore the possibilities of a piece of cloth to its furthest limits,’ say the designers. ‘We hope this exhibition provides an opportunity for audiences not only in fashion, but also in other creative fields and beyond, to encourage dialogues across disciplines.’ Much of the exhibition will centre around the processes behind the pieces, says Kawahara, the complexity of their construction sometimes difficult to communicate to consumers. ‘We aren’t able to explain it personally to people, so here, we wanted to show it.’

‘Fly with IM Men’ runs from 24-26 January 2025 at Le Réfectoire des Cordeliers in Paris.

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