PFW AW25: FLY WITH IM MEN by Issey Miyake

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

I never got to meet Toshiko, the mother of my mother. A squat and plucky immigrant to America’s West Coast from central Japan, I was nonetheless fortunate to grow up surrounded by her vibrant mythology, the ancestral tales of her old-world eccentricities that made her a pleasant peculiarity in post-war Cali. Make sure you eat every last part, she would tell my mum in broken English if they were ever eating fish, watching attentively as her precocious American teen reluctantly chewed on its disembodied head, popping its eyeball between her teeth and scavenging the skull for any clinging morsels of flesh. Don’t throw that away, she would insist if any of the porcelains fell and shattered, instead gathering the shards and piecemealing the brittle bones into an assemblage of jagged shards and mucous-like glue, birthing something hybrid and new.

In Japanese, this might be called mottainai, roughly translatable as a sense of regret for that which is wasted. And walking around IM Men’s debut Paris Fashion Week collection FLY WITH IM MEN all of these ancestral anecdotes and stories strangely trickled back in wraithlike whispers and waves. Perhaps some of this was locational: IM Men’s collection was presented in the Réfectoire des Cordeliers, a former Franciscan monastery whose scraped brick walls sung with its history, attaching a metaphysical vibrancy to the whole affair. However, it was also in the intricate design of IM Men’s clothing, the use of recycled and zero-waste materials, of selvages and offcuts to create garments with a profound, quasi-spiritual reverence for both the fabrics that composed them and the environments from which these raw elements were claimed.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

All of this comes as a natural extension of Miyake’s foundational design philosophy, “a piece of cloth”, which formed the soul of this season’s collection. In practice, this meant that each of the garments– simultaneously ultrastructural and ultraminimalist, composed of drapes and pleats and folds and flows – could be unpacked to their primordial shapes, a rectangular piece of cloth. Through this deconstructionist movement, which positively effaces each garment down to its most essential and intrinsic parts, IM Men centred the materials and techniques presupposing each garment, the Genesis-like ecology of creation that preluded every single item that flew, waned, and waxed down the brand’s Fashion Week runway.

There is something profoundly humanist to this gesture, reminding me of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s strangely ardent derogations of the typewriter for negating the human touch that goes into the art of writing, the auratic value of human creation. But this is not entirely the case. IM Men’s showroom was also a landscape of machines and technologies bursting from the bones of the monastery as if by some technic infection. Bright television screens affixed to the walls displayed runway footage and craft processes in sensory overload; meanwhile, monumental bionic arms, evocative of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s perpetually viral Can’t Help Myself installation or Alexander McQueen’s seminal SS99 show, erupted from the ground, spiralling and swooning like uncanny robotic fungi. 

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

If thinkers like Heidegger have at times considered the human and the machine as antithetical, a discourse recently enflamed by new-age anxieties about generative AI or technology-driven environmental collapse, IM Men rejects this sawtooth supposition. Instead, it explores the serene harmony between the two, inflected by the Japanese belief in the interconnectivity and vitality of all things, the ways in which machines might enhance our relationships with clothing, with the world, and, consequently, with ourselves. 

The fabrics and techniques used for FLY WITH IM MEN were therefore a spectacular symbiosis of Nature and Machine. The Ultrasuede® material used for the “HERON” and “METALLIC ULTRA BOA” garments was an artificial suede made from sustainable plant-based polyesters instead of animal skin, inventing an eco-friendly alternative to cattle rearing and slaughter. And for its “KASURI” line – an homage to a traditional Japanese dying technique of the same name – IM Men wove marbled cotton yarn on a mechanical Jacquard loom, an intimate alliance of the organic and mechanical, the traditional and futuristic. 

FLY WITH IM MEN was therefore, in many ways, more of a manifesto than a simple show, a philosophical exposition layered onto an aesthetic showcase. This is a bold move for such a fledgling brand, only launched in 2021. But, as the progeny of such a monumental figure as Issey Miyake, it is also a fitting homage to and celebration of not just one of fashion’s greatest designers, but one of its greatest thinkers too.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)