Issey Miyake

About the house

Kazunaru Miyake was born in Hiroshima on 22 April 1938 and became known as Issey. Perfume Intelligence says he trained as a graphic designer in Tokyo, worked in Paris, London and New York, then returned to Tokyo. He founded Miyake Design Studio there in 1970, and the first Issey Miyake collection dates to autumn 1971.

The clothing line produced its own inventions. Pleats Please came out in 1993, with garments that can be wadded up without loss of shape and are machine washable. A-POC, short for A Piece Of Cloth, dates to 1998 and uses tubes of fabric that are machine-made and cut to shape by the wearer. Miyake died of liver cancer in Tokyo on 5 August 2022, aged 84.

The fragrances came from a different corporate route. L'Eau d'Issey, the first Issey Miyake fragrance, was introduced in 1992 and created by perfumer Jacques Cavallier. Perfume Intelligence describes it as inspired by Chantal Roos, head of Shiseido's new fragrance division BPI. That Paris subsidiary, Beauté Prestige International, was created by Shiseido in 1990 and has Issey Miyake in its designer portfolio, and the scents are made under licence by Shiseido. In a 2024 Shiseido interview, the fragrance head describes ISSEY MIYAKE PARFUMS as handled through licensing agreements, alongside narciso rodriguez and Zadig & Voltaire.

Cavallier also composed the men's version, L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme, in 1994. Le Feu d'Issey followed in 1998, a floral-spicy-woody scent in a spherical bottle by Gwenael Nicolas.

Shiseido's fragrance head says the house avoids celebrity endorsements and describes it as a unique brand that is not aimed at everyone. Le Sel d'Issey launched after Miyake's death, and Shiseido says its bottle was designed by Tokujin Yoshioka and its campaign used CGI instead of a celebrity face.