On the day the show schedule finally made it to the Japanese designers, whose archives have inspired so many other collections this season, Issey Miyake put on the kind of show that has made the house a pioneer of innovative, clever and peculiar fashion. Case in point: there’s something delightfully Japanese in the idea of a little guy frantically tapping away on screens to create the electro soundtrack to an already techy fashion show. The man in questions was Ei Wada, part of the Open Reel Emsemble group, who performed at last season’s Miyake show. This season he mixed a live soundtrack using cathode-ray tube TV screens. It looked amazing, and created the perfect backdrop for an intelligent collection, which drew on the natural elements theme of the season.
When you design for Issey Miyake, however, you don’t base a collection on the kind of trivial stuff observed by other designers. You base it on things like 'wearing light', which was Yoshiyuki Miyamae’s seemingly impossible Spring/Summer 2014 challenge for himself. He did rather well, though. Perforated leather coats folded themselves into panels reflecting the light, but also letting it in through its lines of tiny holes. Stiff, translucent net coats in orange and blue didn’t just work like a filter for the light on the body, but also provided a viable idea of how to do summer coats. And with the final segment of sliced up, asymmetrically layered dresses and skirts and sculptural tops, Miyamae gave the Japanese fashion crazed season its authoritative fix of masterly Japanese cutting.