London’s Design Museum’s Design Award for the fashion category went this year to the “132 5. Issey Miyake” clothing line. The results of the other six categories - Architecture, Digital, Furniture, Graphics, Product and Transport - are equally exciting and also feature the London 2012 Olympic Torch (by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby) and can be admired in a special display at the Design Museum (until 4th July).
Yet Milan Design Week visitors may have spotted Miyake’s “132 5” project applied to something else, lamps, developed by the fashion designer and his Reality Lab in collaboration with Italian lighting company Artemide.
"I am extremely proud of this collaboration", Artemide’s Chairman Ernesto Gismondi stated in a press release. "Issey Miyake devotes his extraordinary artistic commitment to a quest dedicated to people’s needs and existence. We share Miyake’s values and visions."
As you may remember from a previous post, Miyake’s "132 5" project, exhibited also during last year’s "Future Beauty – 30 Years of Japanese Fashion" event at the Barbican, relies on science and mathematics and was inspired by a conversation with computer scientist Jun Mitani, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of System and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba.
Moving from Dr. Mitani’s three-dimensional paper models created from flat materials and based on mathematical methods, Miyake and his team designed foldable three-dimensional pieces made in a polyester fibre generated by Teijin Limited from chemical recycling by pulverizing, melting and spinning threads out of polyethylene terephthalate.
Also the name of the project has a mathematical derivation: “1” refers to a single piece of cloth; “3” to its three-dimensional shape; “2” relates to the two-dimensional shape in which the piece of clothing can be folded and “5” to the time it takes to a person to actually put the foldable form on and to the multiple ways each garment can be worn.
Conceived by Issey Miyake and his Reality Lab, the lamps are instead called “IN-EI” that in Japanese means “shadow, shadiness, nuance”.
“When you see them, you can’t help feeling moved; when you understand them, you are full of wonder seeing a future we thought unreachable and couldn’t imagine this beautiful”, Ernesto Gismondi adds in the press release.
Indeed the free-standing, table and hanging lamps, incorporating LED lighting, are made entirely in a fabric derived from recycled materials (PET plastic bottles) using an innovative technology that reduces both energy consumption and CO2 emissions up to 40% when compared to the production of new materials.
Each lampshade is based on the “132 5” process, so it can be folded flat just like Miyake’s clothes and can therefore be easily stored when not in use.
Thanks to a special additional surface treatment, the shades can keep their shape without the need for an internal frame. In a way the system is similar to the one deviced by Bruno Munari for his 1964 Falkland lamp made with tights, though Munari's lamp had an internal structure.
Miyake’s "132 5" system was recently applied to a new line of clothes and accessories featuring bright colours and geometric patterns inspired by Nara-born artist, graphic designer and Miyake collaborator Ikko Tanaka (he created posters for Miyake’s collections and exhibition from the ‘80s on), who died 10 years ago.
Will Miyake employ his “system in transformation” to other objects, such as a range of jewellery and maybe come up with foldable experimental tetrahedral, octahedral, icosahedral necklace structures, for example? We’ll have to wait to discover it, but you can be sure that, if he ever does so, he will create once more something mathematically and scientifically intriguing.
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