PARIS — Dai Fujiwara, the new creative director of Issey Miyake, likes to explain his intentions for the Japanese brand in metaphors.
For instance, he refers to the house’s namesake founder as the “sun of inspiration,” and suggests customers need to be reassured with a “handshake” to nudge them gently into the future.
As Fujiwara, 39, sat down for his first interview here since taking over from Naoki Takizawa in October, the longtime Miyake protégé explained how he plans to remain faithful to the house’s commitments to innovation and modernity while developing novelty.
“My mission is to be a strong bridge [from the brand’s past],” explained Fujiwara in English. “Customers buy Miyake because they like it. I don’t need to change everything. I want to speak to the next generation of customers.”
Among the pillars of Fujiwara’s nascent plans is a desire to meld Miyake’s diverse Pleats Please, Fete and main collections with A-POC — or A Piece of Cloth — the experimental line Miyake founded in 1998.
Fujiwara’s desire to grow A-POC, which makes clothes out of a single piece of fabric, is understandable. He was instrumental in helping Miyake develop the collection’s advanced computer-generated mills, and he has been its co-creative director with Miyake, who continues to have a hand in the line, since its inception.
To explain his intentions for the company, the soft-spoken Fujiwara commissioned a video of digitally rendered stick figures constructed out of the letters of each brands’ name. Created by graphic designers Masahiko Sato and Euphrates, the video shows A-POC intermingling through them all like strands of DNA.
“This will be part of my communication tool with the entire company,” explained Fujiwara of the video.
During the interview, Fujiwara unfurled bolts of A-POC fabric with patterns of trousers ready to be cut and assembled. Then he got down on his hands and knees as he explained how the process worked.
For example, he believes A-POC is no longer a futuristic concept. “A-POC was for the digital generation,” he explained. “But now the digital generation is not a special world. It’s part of the general world.”
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To that end, Fujiwara said he had coined the “A-POC Inside” name. In general terms, the concept entails using A-POC technology in invisible ways in the other collections.
“There’s so much fashion already,” said Fujiwara of his decision to mix the lines. “It breeds confusion. When a customer buys Pleats Please or A-POC, it’s all Miyake.”
For his first collection, this January’s men’s wear, Fujiwara said he would forgo a runway presentation in Paris for a collection long on denim pieces that he says is inspired by mailmen and truck drivers.
His first show will mix men’s and women’s together during the March ready-to-wear shows in Paris in what Fujiwara said he hoped would consolidate the brand’s image into a strong whole.
Though Fujiwara insisted he’s not interested in radical changes to the brand’s aesthetic, he did suggest plenty of differences between himself and Takizawa, who plans to launch his own line under the Miyake umbrella.
“He’s like a big brother,” he said. “We are in the same family, but I’m of a little bit different generation.”
Then he laughed: “I can be pretty funky.”
Earlier this year, Nobuyuki Ota, president of Issey Miyake Inc., said Miyake’s main collection and its Fete line generated $26 million in turnover in Japan, while the Pleats Please business added another $61 million. He did not give figures for the rest of the world.