A-POC 12 By Issey Miyake

A-POC 12

Text by Chie Matsumoto

chiez2001@yahoo.com

Rebellion is the motive behind Issey Miyake's A-POC project. Breaking the mold of fashion industry, his team is striving to design clothes for all people.

With his philosophy well accepted by the public, Miyake presented the series' latest collection in May in Tokyo and plans to bring it to Europe soon.

"Unless someone tries to open the book, the story can't begin," says Dai Fujiwara, Miyake's apprentice since 1997 and a chief designer of the A-POC project. "We want as many people as possible to wear A-POC clothes to understand their mystery and their beauty."

Miyake's brain-child project called, A-POC (A Piece of Cloth), which he and Fujiwara first introduced in 1998, goes against the traditional concept of designer fashion. While the designer clothes seem to be limited to the catwalk or the chosen few, A-POC reaches out to diverse clients. In search of uniqueness and rarity, patrons sometimes prefer designer logo because they may be wearing one of a kind. But that is not to say that A-POC lacks originality.

The A-POC project has brought a revolution to the fashion industry--twice. In 1970s, when Miyake introduced the magnitude of a piece of cloth, and in 1998, when he and Fujiwara interpreted the same concept with a computer technology.

"The wearers complement the clothes in this series,'' says Fujiwara, taking on his master's philosophy. Lifeless without a person wearing it, the fabric comes alive only when arms go through the sleeves and the pants wrap around the legs. That's when "A Piece of Cloth" (A-POC) stops being mere fabric and starts breathing.

First , there was a tube of knit for this new project. But when a pair of scissors runs along the outline of a shirt drawn on the tube, a complete shirt is cut out and ready to be worn. No sleeve, collar or back and front pieces need to be sewn.

Though the atypical clothes patterns and the designing process opened eyes of other fashion moguls, the concept was so new and unconventional that people had a hard time understanding it earlier in the years.

It was not just the design that isolated the team from the industry. It is also because the Miyake team designers intended to stay out of it. To break the routine of seasonal collection, they have refused to use the industry jargon. That by itself is out of the ordinary in the industry.

They don't mind being labeled as eccentric and continue calling the new series "A-POC 12." Although it is actually the '04 Autumn-Winter collection and they do present the new mode for every season, they want to avoid getting mixed up with the mainstream designer collections, Fujiwara says. Because the A-POC clothes must be worn and shown by average people, the Miyake team is trying to stay out of the industry and hoping that the clients feel the A-POC outfits are everyday wear.

As a part of the promotion campaign, the team of designers also took a caravan to department stores in Tokyo to demonstrate how they can cut "Baguette" T-shirts of the A-POC 3 series to shorten its sleeves or discard the turtle neck collar according to the wearer's taste. Apart from it, a monthlong A-POC exhibition was held in Tokyo last year to provide the venue for anyone to actually touch the fabric and see the design patterns. The show drew more than 12,000 visitors as a result.

"After all these years, we have finally won people's understanding of designing the clothes for this project," Fujiwara says.

At an A-POC store in Tokyo's trendy Aoyama district, clerks advise the customers on altering the brand-new purchase to best suit their style. This, Fujiwara says, is just like a noodle shop where a chef kneads the dough and feeds his client a fresh bowl of noodles because that's the way to enjoy the taste. Unfortunately, some of the A-POC stores in the world fashion centers such as Paris, New York and London, clerks don't provide the same service.

"Ever since then, people began recognizing this series as the Issey Miyake brand. Whereas at the beginning, they were disinterested as they only saw the concept as mere cut-outs. But now they stopped to think what it really is."

All it involves is a piece of cloth. A piece of cloth has a dept and history, Fujiwara says, inheriting his master's teachings. The "god" of fashion design--Fujiwara calls Miyake--began advocating the importance and meaning of a piece of cloth in the 70s. It has comforted, caressed and embraced humans in their daily lives. Miyake re-evaluated the original delicate beauty of the cloth and framed A-POC is a modern interpretation of the same concept presented with the use of computer technology.

With computer programming, the team can create thread and textiles fit to produce the design as actual clothes. For A-POC 3 "Baguette," for instance, the team needed to develop the knit that never frays.

In the A-POC project, the design is the priority. To produce that design, the team composes textiles. And for the textiles that accommodate the design, there must be thread that can be woven to make the textiles. Textile must be carefully selected to accommodate the designs.

"Possibility never ends as sheer possibility within A-POC project," Fujiwara says at Issey Miyake Studio in Tokyo, where the team had the first presentation of A-POC 12 series in May. Any idea or imagination can form a shape through the technological communication. That is how the team can enjoy much more freedom in designing or making the clothes and where each member's originality is pushed forth, Fujiwara says.

No doubt the end product and result are what matter the most, but in A-POC project, the process is more important.

The new series is a children's drawing made into three dimensional, and more precisely Jean Dubufee's painting taking the form of fabric. One of the eight team members wanted to recreate a child's doodling in textiles. With the computer technology as an indispensable tool in A-POC designing, the abstract idea was molded.

Jean Dubufee, it is. A-POC 12 introduces expressions of colors and textures in two categories: woven and knit. Unlike other series, the 12th collection features three-dimensional structures as it continues to focus on layers of fabric. "Angle Jacket" has parts woven and folded within the loom. Some parts such as sleeve edges, collars and hems that require certain stiffness are double layered while other parts have a single layer.

Following the 1950s French painter's three-color scheme, the team figured that Dubufee's style a way of interpreting the murky gray of three-color mixture into a more beautiful fashion. The yarns in yellow, magenta, cyan, and black in this case, were introduced for the "Mixed" series of A-POC 12. When layered, these basic single colors mix and produce more than four single colors of fabric but also variations of the four.

"We simply felt that it was interesting," Fujiwara, 37, says. "We felt it easier to realize the concept through the A-POC series."

The story of A-POC begins only when people run their arms through the sleeves. Once clients put the clothes on, they can pursue their individuality. "We would like many people to learn about the A-POC project, enjoy seeing the design and get drawn to it by wearing it," Fujiwara says.

Nothing can be born out of nothing. It's a team-work and collaboration. The project is revolving around the 66-year-old world's leading designer who steers and organizes the whole operation by inspiring the members to bring out their ideas.

As Miyake and his team of designers were still testing their boundaries earlier in the series, T-shirts and dresses only required cutting straight lines.

But they have fine-tuned their skills.

Through "Just Before" and "King & Queen" to "Face" and "Baguettes" then on to the A-POC 12, the team altered the kinds of fabric and separated parts of the clothes to adopt more complex designs.

A-POC, however, never stays within fashion. Just as seen in the 4th series "Midas," a cushion-sofa-bed, the project can develop into anything that is made of fabric. According to Fujiwara, a new border has opened up into interior furniture. An updated version of "Midas" is not yet mature, but it will be first introduced in Europe.

"A-POC is only to evolve," Fujiwara says. "How it evolves depends on Issey Miyake. But all we know is that this is just the beginning and a long life awaits ahead of us."