Seamless history unraveled | How one man saw the future of fashion
Published on Wired by Jessie Scanlon
The year was 2004 and the 65-year-old Japanese designer had shown nearly 100 collections and won almost every fashion award in existence. Long admired for his innovation, Miyake had boiled and melted fabric and played with bamboo and ultrasound. He had invented the science of wrinkling and perfected the art of surprise. But Miyake no longer wanted a designer label; he wanted a design lab. Before turning his eponymous line over to a protégé, he sent one final zinger down the runway: 23 models wearing a single dress. Not 23 dresses sewn together, but a single banner of fabric embedded with 23 dresses – connected like a chain of paper dolls.
It was both a grand finale and a preview: Miyake was leaving to focus on A-POC, an experiment he began in the mid-'90s and turned into an independent line in 1999. An acronym for "a piece of cloth," A-POC refers to both the fashion label and the manufacturing process behind it. That process breaks one of the fundamental laws of fashion physics: cut and sew. Normally, clothes were made by weaving thread or yarn into fabric, which is then snipped and stitched to create, say, a dress. The A-POC method requires no sewing. Thread goes into the loom, the dress comes out. Specifically, a flattened tube of material emerges that contains the finished shirt, skirt, or pants, which need only to be cut out along the faint outline already woven or knit into the fabric. Moreover, the material can be snipped anywhere without unraveling, a feature that allows for complete customization. A pair of scissors and a flirtatious spirit can turn a turtleneck into a plunging V-neck.
Miyake had so far kept the patent-pending process a closely guarded secret. But fashion insiders recognized that the technology behind A-POC – the process of melding thread into clothing, seamlessly – represented an entirely new way of making clothes, one that had less to do with the needles and bobbins of a garment factory than with rapid prototyping methods used in manufacturing.
On a hot afternoon in September, Issey Miyake oversaw the final installation of an exhibition of A-POC clothing at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo. Since leaving the runway, the designer has ignored the inflexible calendar of the fashion world, debuting instead his 11 A-POC collections whenever he wants, at museums and galleries like this one.
Miyake didn't attempt to move beyond cutting and sewing until 1995, when Dai Fujiwara arrived at the studio. Now A-POC's design engineer, the 36-year-old Fujiwara offers a counterpoint to his mentor's easy charm. Miyake is, at heart, an artist moved by the beauty of the human form and the clothes that enfold it, while Fujiwara is a born tinkerer: A-POC's single-form creation process sprang from his mind.
Makita Shoten, one of four manufacturers turning out the A-POC line, founded in 1869 to make silk for kimonos but as the small weavers of this region gave way to IT companies, Makita brought its looms into the digital age. Most of Makita's business involves producing fabric that's sent elsewhere to be sewn into garments or products like umbrellas.
By now Tamura does know enough to expect what she calls "the notorious yarn attack," when Fujiwara sends Makita the newest yarns to be tested. The Miyake design team searches out fibers and filaments the way other designers hunt for new fabrics. Nearly all of their findings end up in Makita's test swatches. The good, the bad, and the truly bizarre results (polyurethane gauze, anyone?) are returned to the studio, where they serve as a springboard for the next generation of A-POC clothing that will spill out of Makita's hulking Staubli loom.
In addition, the Miyake studio employs the Jacquard to produce more complex designs and experiment radically with all of the possible variables: the thickness of the thread, the density of the weave, the shape of the garment. The designers are able to specify the placement of every yarn – to make, say, the cuffs of a shirt more elastic than the neck. These details are specified in the pattern data Miyake sends to Makita, where the 0s and 1s become Miyake's patented creations.
"Clothing has been called intimate architecture," Miyake says. "We want to go beyond that." Meaning furniture and building components. That A-POC aims to blur the distinction between fashion line and industrial product surprises few who know him. "He is a true design pioneer," says Sherri Geldin, director of the Columbus, Ohio, Wexner Center for the Arts, which just awarded Miyake its prestigious Wexner Prize in recognition of his impact across creative fields. "I don't think of him as a fashion designer," says Richard Koshalek, the president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. "He functions on a very high level with regard to new ideas. A-POC has the potential to transform many design disciplines."