The designer Issey Miyake is known for his conceptual purity and elegant simplicity. His work exudes exuberance, dynamism, movement, and colour; it is contemporary yet timeless.
Today, a great new adventure begins in the annals of Issey Miyake fragrance, continuing to forge a powerful bond with his fashion. Issey Miyake is known globally for his signature pleats- a look that went around the world in more than 80 colours. Today, the iconic line Pleats Please Issey Miyake has its own fragrance. It is a scent that pays homage to a seminal fashion creation: an infusion of emotion and olfactory ode to joy.
L’Eau d’Issey and L’Eau d’Issey Pour l’Homme burst forth from the fountain of Issey Miyake fragrances; clear and shimmering, the waters heralded Issey Miyake’s first foray into perfumery.The Pleats Please Issey Miyake fragrance has its own special sparkle, the latest and bright facet of the designer’s work.
Every fold in place: Pleats through history
The concept of pleats dates back to the dawn of civilization. The women of ancient Egypt wore kalasiris. The beautiful statue of Karomama in the Louvre depicts the “divine adoratrice” in a pleated dress. Many years later…In the early 20th century, the house of Fortuny, known for its silk and the Delphos dress elevated the pleat again, inspired by the bronze “Charioteer of Delphi”. In the late 1980s, Issey Miyake raised the pleat to a new level, achieving the paradoxical combinations of…
Creativity and practicality.
“Fashion” and everyday life.
Timeless and of the moment.
The classic and the high-tech.
With Pleats Please, Miyake had constructed a trans-cultural bridge between the East and West, a link between worlds that seemed utterly incompatible.
Pleats Please: a unique label, a distinctive story, a universal fashion concept.
The story was launched in 1993 by a chance collaboration with William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet. Forsythe invited the designer to create costumes for “The Loss of Small Detail.” A collection arose from examining what sort of costumes could allow the dancers to move. Pleats Please were born from experimentation, ultimately becoming a basic garment, timeless but creative and original. Timeless! In Issey Miyake’s hands, the pleat rapidly evolved, becoming more and more practical — lightweight, easy to wear and simple to maintain: a line comprised of basic pieces plus seasonal items.
The label’s ingenious technically innovative pleating process was the first of its kind in the creation of pleated garments. The fabric is first cut and sewn together, at two and a half to three times its final size, sandwiched between two pieces of paper then fed through a pleating machine to seal the pleats into the fabric’s memory and create garments in the right proportions. The designer describes the garments popping out of the pleat press “like toast from a toaster”.This sophisticated pleating technology gives the garment a permanent shape. Initially “2D”, it reveals its three-dimensional form on the body. The colour palette for the Pleats Please basics featured basic monochromes, but as the collections were updated each season they introduced more lively colourful prints, with upbeat ethnic and folk inspirations. From 1996 to 1998, the legendary “Guest Artists Series” offered collaborations on Pleats with work by Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang — wearable works of art! The pleat as seen by Issey Miyake embodies a universal concept with few equivalents in fashion history.Women all over the world have embraced it. With its basic forms and comfortable fabrics, ensuring easy wear and care, Pleats Please represents a breath of freedom, the pleasure of unrestricted expression and unimpeded movement.Today, this iconic look, the emblem and essence of Issey Miyake’s identity, has its counterpart in a fragrance.
An olfactory portrayal
To capture the joyous, light-hearted character of Pleats Please, Aurélien Guichard has composed a bright and cheerful bouquet. A nectar of bliss, an incitation to savour the pleasures of life. Its primary inspiration was light, an intrinsic element in the world of Issey Miyake, in the form of shimmering highlights. Then came the idea of verticality, reflecting the structure of the pleat. To this was added movement, induced by the flow of the pleat as it moves with the body. Free-flowing and yet finely chiselled, the composition is imbued with a sense of comfort.
The sparkling top note opens with the intriguing aroma of nashi, a hybrid fruit that oscillates between pear and apple, with the pear note predominating. For this new fragrance, the exuberance and heartiness of a floral bouquet was a must — flowers to define the femininity of a subtle delicate composition. The joyous, upbeat middle note suggests a graceful sensuality, blossoming forth with fresh peony and sweet pea. Indole adds a fleshly, voluptuous touch and “gives substance to the note”, the perfumer explains. The accord is warm and vibrant, like “an invitation to fluidity”.
The base note prolongs the sensation of mildness, settling into the rich woody notes of cedar while patchouli, taking on a vertical character, permeates the composition. Sweet, sensuous vanilla infuses the trail with radiant warmth. An absolute of creamy “white vanilla” blends with cosy white musks for a mellow finish. Guichard wanted to create a pleat-like “vertical” fragrance, a genuine floral that conveys an unequivocal, all-embracing femininity. Like a plush cocoon, Pleats Please is an addictive fragrance, a composition whose meticulously sculpted facets are echoed in its bottle.
From 2D pleats to a 3D bottle
To interpret the image of the pleat, the geometrical spirit of a multifaceted polyhedron seemed the obvious choice. Miyake’s many lines already included clothing derived from pleats or folds which evokes such faceted volumes.
The ridges stand out on the glass bottle in an interplay of convex and concave volumes. The multiple facets of the Pleats Please polyhedron come alive with never-ending ripples of light. There are no bright colours, just subtle highlights enlivened by the pink-tinged fragrance.
The development of this bottle, the 3D embodiment of the 2D image of the pleat, was a complex undertaking. The cap takes the form of a floral calyx, a finely pleated abstraction that symbolises both a white flower and the Pleats Please fabric.
The case exudes a cheerful sense of fantasy, mixing pink with orange in a jubilant fan dance of stylised petals traversed by veins that subtly evoke pleats. In direct homage to its fashion origins, the name “Pleats Please” adopts a logotype in which the E’s are narrowed, pressed and compressed as though finely pleated.
The product range comprises a trio of eau de toilette in three formats: 30, 50 and 100 ml.
The EdTs are supplemented by two derivatives infused with the notes of Pleats Please: a creamy, body lotion and a deodorant spray.
On the move
In a major first for Issey Miyake, to dynamise the spirit of the brand’s new fragrance, the ad film for Pleats Please was created by one of the biggest names in contemporary photography: Nick Knight.Bold imagery, a break with convention, culture shock… The new choices of communication capture perfectly the pulsating, energetic facet of Pleats Please.Dressed in pleats of every colour, the model leaps and dances, twirls and spins. The photographer interacts with his subject, filming her from every angle to reveal the magic of pleats in motion. Playing on silhouettes, dance brings movement to the facets of a garment that inspires light-hearted, exuberant motion.
Gusts of wind make dresses billow, scarves ripple.
Action brings the spirit of the pleat to life.
Energy!
One, two, three, four… The bodies multiply in a whirlwind of images of the woman-bottle.
During the shoot, Nick Knight filmed his model in motion. Then, in the cutting room, he decided to build a visual crescendo by multiplying the silhouettes nearly to the point of saturating the screen, filling it with the bright, cheery colours of the pleats.The film unfolds in a mathematical progression: one, two, three, four… A never-ending series to express infinite joy. To extract a still photo from the film, Knight chose a colour-drenched visual that combines multiple views of the model. Dance, arabesques — even on a single page, the freedom, energy and joy, come through. Nick Knight’s imagery offers a brilliant interpretation of Issey Miyake’s own comments about his pleats: “Pleats never cease to fascinate me, conjuring up a multitude of images.” “Pleats move and change form with the wearer’s every movement. As the pleats move they change colors, creating an optical illusion like a kaleidoscope.”A kaleidoscope! The film offers a vision in which horizontal and vertical lines diverge into angles and diagonals to end up in motion, delineating curves. In his quest for the timeless and functional in fashion, Issey Miyake found his answer in pleats. Fashion keeps moving, and so does fragrance!
Today there’s an olfactory echo to his creative vision: Pleats Please, the fragrance.
Price:
50ml – AED 320
100ml – AED 475
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