Hannah Baer, Jane Hu, Nicole Lipman, Haley Mlotek, Su Wu
Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself
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“I seem to be present at occasions of great social change,” Issey Miyake once said, “Paris in May ’68, Beijing at Tiananmen, New York on 9/11. Like a witness to history.” It’s a puzzling, even paradoxical, statement—both in its self-mythologization and self-effacement. But when Miyake finally died last month at the age of 84, so much of the self-mythology seemed to come true. Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was still living there when the atomic bomb fell—just another one of his brushes with world history. But it would be the clothes—their lightness and life—for which he will be most remembered.
Everyone who knows, who loves, who has worn Issey Miyake has a signature anecdote about their first encounter with him. Maybe you were in Paris, London, or Japan; or maybe you were nowhere near any metropolis at all. (For me, it was when I texted a friend a pair of Top Shop pants I liked, and her response was, “It looks like knock-off Issey Miyake.”) Whether you immediately recognize the class signalling implied by his brand, Miyake’s cultural significance can only really be properly grasped in something like slow motion. Like the infamous Pleats Please line he engineered, he’s got layers.
So many of the images that circulated in the wake of Miyake’s death suggest the uncanny dynamism of his designs: the fabrics look caught in impossible freeze-frames, animated in midair, as if the clothes themselves were holding their breath. Miyake famously never considered his garments complete until a body was inside them, as he was “most interested in people and the human form,” and clothing was simply, as he put it, “the closest thing to all humans.” The final product often feels like sculpture of another medium. His were designs of and for the living.
One of my favorite anecdotes about Issey Miyake: he once presented his team with a book of Irving Penn photographs featuring close-ups of flowers and asked them to design a collection of dresses around it. As far as art direction goes, it’s surprising only insofar as it feels ultimately inevitable coming from him. Maybe you can only really appreciate Miyake after the fact, by repeatedly pressing rewind, or hitting pause at just the right moment. Meanwhile, his clothes persist on the bodies of people—fainting, draping, wilting—like so many angels of history. —Jane Hu
At every job I’ve ever had in fashion there’s always a certain brand or designer or aesthetic that gets adopted by everyone, no matter their taste or preference, for good reason: it’s good. For the job I most recently worked, I still see it the second I step foot out of my apartment. Friends wear it with sneakers on our hikes up the mountain, people on the subway brush nonexistent dust off of it after sitting down, and there is always that moment of eye contact at the coffee shop between two customers dressed in the same pair of pants. The first time I went to a new dentist, recommended by a colleague, I was wearing mine. The dentist looked me up and down above his clipboard, and rather than ask who referred me gestured at my outfit. “SSENSE,” he said, like a statement.
“Yes,” I said, holding the delicate material with a pinch.
Some clichés never stop earning their status. We are all, it’s true, cut from the same cloth. But that cloth is different when it’s an Issey Miyake cloth. In her obituary, Curbed design editor Diana Budds wisely said that there is “a stereotype that the design world’s uniform is anything black. But more aspirationally, it’s anything Issey Miyake.”
When Miyake passed away on August 5, at 84 years old, the condolences were as effusive as any compliments his work received during his long career: a testament to how beloved he was in his own time, that the eulogies matched the historical records. He once told the fashion writer Tim Blanks that “Clothes are not abstract like architecture or graphic design, they’re a public reflection of people’s joys and hopes,” and that sentiment is embodied in the devotion so many people will forever have to what he made.
As a young designer who studied at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicate de la Couture Parisienne, Miyake later worked for Hubert de Givenchy and saw the most traditional of ateliers; soon after he worked for Geoffrey Beene in New York and felt for himself the revolutionary promise of students marching in blue jeans. Though he often said he didn’t want to be known as a fashion designer, he was an excellent defender of and representative for fashion’s place in art. When he was still a graphic design student, in 1960, the World Design Conference came to Japan, and when no one was chosen to represent fashion Miyake directly challenged the organizer’s decision. Later, Ingrid Sischy would famously put a Miyake dress on a cover of Artforum as a message that this was work that mattered as much as anything in another medium. He was the master of turning something that could feel old—cut from the same cloth—into something truer and newer, his love for clothes the kind of constructive sleight of hand that makes genius feel as natural as nudity.
Miyake had wanted to be a dancer as a child, and in 1991, he would make the costumes for William Forsythe’s ballet The Loss of Small Detail. It was an early attempt at shaping pleating around the body’s movements, using sashiko technique (a method of cotton quilting designed for and worn by workers) in polyester jersey, and it was the way different material could be incorporated into a collaborative effort that became his life’s work. In Rachel Tashjian’s words, he “thought obsessively, happily, about freedom, about what experimentation and even rebellion could invite.”
A famous anecdote: Miyake designed uniforms for Sony in 1981 as part of a tribute for their thirty-fifth anniversary, a jacket made of rip-stop nylon easily converted into a vest. (This was not the only time he provided an official garment: he also made the Lithuanian Olympic uniforms in 1992, shortly after their independence from the Soviet Union). When Steve Jobs visited the factory, he liked the look of their uniforms so much he tried to commission Miyake to make a vest for Apple employees, but they really didn’t want to wear them. Their loss. Jobs relinquished, but kept the idea for himself. Miyake’s black turtlenecks became Jobs’s personal uniform. When he passed away in 2011, his closet had “like a hundred of them”: enough, he poignantly said, “to last for the rest of my life.” Miyake stopped producing the turtlenecks after Jobs died.
Miyake maintained professional and personal relationships with all sorts of people. 132 5, a range of two-dimensional items that unfolded to be three-dimensional when worn, was influenced by Jun Mitani, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who specializes in crafting geometric modeling and origami with computer software. There was the Guest Artist series between 1996 and 1998, when Miyake invited contemporary artists to work with Pleats Please like it was any of their other materials. Miyake saw everything as collaboration: nothing was done until it was worn. “When I make something, it’s only half-finished,” he explained. “When people use it—for years and years—then it is finished.”
At the beginning of his career Miyake modeled his clothes on Fusae Ichikawa, a preeminent feminist leader and activist in Japan who was one of the major figures of women’s suffrage in the country. The acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid (called “The Queen of the Curve” by The Guardian) wore Miyake in her portrait shot by Irving Penn. She told Hans Ulrich Obst, in an interview for AnOther Magazine, that she loved the “crinkling” of his early works, buying them as presents for her friends and painting on them “like a canvas, raw linen.” Miyake loved the ceramicist Lucy Rie, and made her a custom design when they met in her eighties; she was too little to wear anything off-the-rack. He asked Liliane Lijn, the daughter of Surrealist painter Manina Tischler and a pioneer of kinetic text, to model for him as part of a series of portraits showcasing creative women. Thirty years later she told Hettie Judah that she still remembered the human warmth of his designs. His clothes “didn’t subscribe to the conventional notions of what a woman should look like.”
I am, like so many others, most enamored with the line Pleats Please. Every item is composed of a series of pleats so fine they resemble blades of grass, a plisse technique made perfect with a heat press. The pleats were inspired by the Fortuny gowns of the early 1900s, sometimes called a Delphos gown after the statue Charioteer of Delphi, a mythological meaning to what became for some an everyday item. Most astoundingly of all, the clothes could be machine washed. After decades in which domestic technological improvements were kept far away from objects of value—i.e. never letting your favorite pants into the washing machine—Pleats Please garments proved to be some of those rare items that could be special without being fragile.
In 1998, Miyake said that the present was “a bit behind.” It’s a fair assessment. Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself—even as there is a relentless churn between reifying the new and romanticizing the old, there’s a grief that comes when we notice the way time turns to age. The only counter to the cynicism of today’s luxury market is a good sense of humor, which is to say, a certain stamina for constant ego death. You are always looking at photos of yourself from not too long ago, always shaking your head, always preparing to say the phrase we use to distance ourselves from who we once were: what was I thinking? In Miyake’s clothes, though, we can be saved from this embarrassment. It’s hard to describe how some things can be trends that will come and go, while others will remain as elemental as Pleats Please. I can only cite another cliché with a slight variation: we know it when we wear it.
I bought my first pair of pants after many, many discussions with my peers who were better versed in the sizing than I was (the numbers are better understood as the length of the pants rather than the width of the pants, for example), and when they arrived in the mail I touched them as carefully as I would anything precious before wearing them to go grocery shopping. I now own two shirts as well, and know a skirt will follow as soon as I have the money to spend. These items are not what most people would consider affordable, but they are what anyone can recognize as valuable; they are not exactly practical, but they are worn so easily. They are a marvel.
Miyake made dresses for ballerinas and technocrats, architects and assistants. There is a languishing that happens when people spend too long thinking about clothes, the churn of an assembly line one that dulls the thrill of wearing something new. But Miyake was always a designer who wanted people to choose his clothes freely, to wear them as membership but without subscription. His clothes exist almost out of hierarchy, unmistakable to see and yet blending entirely into the wearer’s personality—when the owner of the gallery wears them on the same day as the curatorial assistant, and even though there is certainly a formula to these fits, they both look like they’re dressed like themselves. His memory will be attached to these fabrics with the same power as a scent—something that trails a bit behind, even as it keeps you together, even as it transports you farther than you knew was possible.
Once, in the last months of high school, the local paper published headshots of various award winners including me, for some honor I can no longer remember (though probably not for attendance). My mother’s friend, who was an editor at the paper, saw my photo and felt it best to call my mother. The portrait, I should explain, wasn’t alarming for being lewd, or even sullen. It was only very unflattering. Upon receiving the call, my mother had to reassure her friend that, no, it wasn’t a prank—that I had submitted that photo myself. All I ever wanted in that town, and still do, is to get as far away as I can from the deep-down wish to be really, really pretty.
I suppose it is unremarkable to feel this way about one’s appearance–that it is at once oppressive and carefully considered, like something approximating the insides of a relationship. We live in a world far too happy to repackage and sell our anxiety back to us, even as I know that getting dressed is an intelligence difficult to defend as existing solely for solitary pleasure. Style—no matter how subjective the vagaries of taste—is almost always an act of communication, a bid for approval. If you don’t face this then the most you manage to say is, I want you to think I am beautiful, or failing that, I want you to think I am rich, or even worse, I don’t care what I look like, which no one believes anyway.
Issey Miyake helped me try to reconcile the hypocrisy and compromise that forms around caring how you look. His designs allowed me to love clothes, and love them to a fault, but to keep from them what I wanted and not have to give them up completely, for having nothing really to say. Miyake’s clothes, in other words, do not make your butt look good.
In a more recent photo from last year (one my high school self would approve of), I am wearing a peaked shoulder blouse tucked into elastic-waist shorts, both by Issey Miyake. Some beloved friends and I are posing together in a plaza, and I remember afterwards two of them sitting huddled over a smartphone, professionally chic women in uncharacteristic concern. They were having trouble editing the photo so that I wouldn’t look so lumpy. Here, again, was love as protection. But while no one has ever complimented how I looked while wearing Issey Miyake, sometimes they do compliment the clothes themselves. Once it was a long yellow gown with a half dome attached to the back, resembling a bubble or maybe an exaggerated wart made of a corrugated athletic mesh. When I wore it, it was not yet vintage but more like fifteen seasons past current, at what is usually a low point in a garment’s life, but the editorial director of Vogue still looked at it carefully, before asking me who I was wearing.
Miyake designed clothes that do something other than making you feel beautiful—that do not worry about their wearer’s physical particularities, like his poorly named Plantation line, which my best friend and I wore a lot in those years in Los Angeles. Launched in 1981, along with a collection of big nylon windjackets, it was one of the first lines of clothing marketed as genderless and ageless and sizeless, but also mostly involved sacks with sleeves. Or my first Miyake piece—a neon green Pleats Please plisse scarf that collapsed like a paper lantern on the table but formed spikes around the neck—which I bought with my grandmother at a mall in Tokyo when I was 12. I don’t remember much about adolescence except the lingering confusion, mostly not knowing then what type of idealized body I wanted or was even supposed to want. But as much as I had been taught to distrust liking myself, to worry if I looked close in the mirror and found nothing wanting, I feared disappearing even more. I wanted to exist without having to be pleasing. And in Miyake’s designs I sensed I might be honest in caring about what I wore—even to the point of showing off—without also having to care about being pretty. This was the punk imperative, too. Though it pains me a bit to realize that it was possible to be unattractive in Issey Miyake and yet not offend anyone—the true brilliance of his work—which made it easier to keep wearing it as I grew up. For me, Miyake was foremost among those who designed not necessarily for a desirable body, but also not for an invisible one either. Wearing his clothes, we are more like snails lending a shell its ostensible purpose but not its lustrous form, or weights holding a sail of fabric against the wind.
Miyake apparently once said that he made “clothes,” not “fashion.” And I think it’s important to recognize that his work too was not simply concept nor art: it took a resounding physical form, that mattered. Its gestures were assured, not ironic jokes. And if his designs were not useful, not like a push-up bra is useful, it is only that to appraise whether objects work well is a presumption of design that centers what we want from things, and not how things can also use us. Miyake’s clothes, in their billows and points and general ill-fittingness—as well as in their material investigations—leave a legacy of us not looking our best. Instead, they suggest what other pursuits there exist for fashion beyond flattery, and desires far better for which to fall.
I started collecting Pleats, if you would believe it, before I was living in New York. I remember Elizabeth coming to tell me she had gotten herself a present, and arriving wearing simply the most stunning and unusual pants I had ever seen. Simultaneously overstated and minimal, bouncing crenulated flows dipped and repeated a black-and-white-printed pattern curlicuing into a perfectly elegant silhouette. “What,” I asked. “Pleats Please,” she replied.
Gender transition is different for different people, but part of my experience was frequently asking the question: “how can my strange body feel good in a given article of clothing?” I borrowed Elizabeth’s Pleats pants over and over, coveting them. I learned that they were expensive, but that there was an aftermarket for them. A friend told me about a website—the “Japanese eBay,” they called it—where, through a proxy server, you could shop for inexpensive Pleats from Japan. They would get mailed to a warehouse in Japan and then shipped by air or by sea to America. Shipping was a rather high flat rate, so it made sense to buy more items and pool orders with friends. Browsing this website, often in google-translated English, became my new hobby.
Issey Miyake started producing the Pleats Please collection in 1988, the year I was born, but it only became its own independent diffusion line in 1993. The clothes are undeniably elegant, situated on a wavering ridge between casual and formal, elegant and cozy. Pleats Please was and is coded as fancy, but only if you recognize it; in this way, it’s less attention-seeking than other kinds of couture, or perhaps more selectively attention-seeking. The designs have been copied and proliferated such that if you’re not attuned to the thing, the clothes appear almost nondescript (for instance: google image search “popcorn shirt”).
This kind of coded, if-you-know-you-know disclosure also abounds in both trans and Jewish experience. Once, a therapist of mine thought I was AFAB—when I mentioned taking estrogen and T-blockers to try and gently come out to him, he still didn’t clock me. Not everyone gets the message. But like a fancy girl mezuzah, the Pleats still make a quiet statement. The humiliation of transphobia–of publicly performing what can any day feel like a shoddy simulacrum of femininity–was offset by feeling hot and cool in the precise way one does when each movement of your body creates tectonic echoes in the cascading plications draping your form. Pleats made me feel good.
Because I didn’t live in New York when I became fixated on Pleats, I didn’t totally understand what it meant to the people, often of a certain class, to whom it signified. When I eventually returned to New York, having collected lots of Pleats, people—especially women—began to teach me what wearing it meant culturally. I remember going to a RISD acquaintance’s fashion show my first month back, where the grouchiest-looking man I’d ever seen sat in the VIP in head-to-toe layered Pleats. When Emily and I first saw each other after five years apart, we were both wearing black Pleats pants; she shared with me an article she had written about the designs, which perfectly captures the idea of Issey Miyake and especially Pleats as arriving as close to timelessness as one can in fashion, a uniform without being repetitive. Mari gave me a copy of the large-format Taschen book about Pleats. Sam sent me countless photos of celebs wearing Pleats and memes about the clothes (a picture of a three-times folded white 8.5”x11” paper, the caption “i love your top is it issey”). Sarah gave me the Issey Miyake Bodyworks book, lent me and styled me in so many Issey Miyake pieces.
I was told that everyone looked good in Pleats. I was told that I wouldn’t look good in Pleats after my boob job because only slender frames looked good in Pleats. I was told that nipples often show through the Pleats tops and that some people like that and some people don’t. I was told it was the sweatsuit of the art world. I was told that Pleats were originally designed for businesswomen who traveled because, unlike other dress clothes, you could fold them in a suitcase and then immediately wear them without steaming or ironing. I had entered the cult because of aesthetics; the cultural loading came later. But as I learned what the brand meant to other people, I only fell more deeply in love.
When Kiki and I met, they taught me about the threat to human well-being posed by petroleum-based plastics. They refused to drink out of water bottles that sat in hot cars, wouldn’t microwave takeout containers, and encouraged me to wear natural fibers. I began to learn about plastic. Polyester, I learned, is made out of a plastic endearingly named PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is formed in little pellets, and then melted down and extruded to make fibers which are then woven, acid-dyed—in some cases heated and pleated—sewn, and shipped to clothing retailers. PET is used to make plastic water bottles, salad dressing containers, soda bottles, shampoo bottles, and other containers for so-called household products. It is reinforced with glass fiber to make car parts, surfboards, wind turbines, furniture innards, circuit boards, and many other more or less esoteric objects. It is also used to make Pleats.
PET is renowned for being durable and pliable (imagine squeezing an empty two-liter soda bottle versus a more brittle plastic). This combination of qualities means that it can be used to create highly structural fabric. Polyester garments will hold their pleating through repeated washing (though the heat of drying will sometimes slightly soften creases) and PET-based fabric is often wrinkle-resistant. The endurance of the Pleats themselves, as well as the other kinds of structure associated with Issey designs (pointed shoulders, flanged hips, swaying buttresses that trail the ankles when you walk) can be attributed to the material qualities of PET-based fabric.
It follows that clothing which resembles architecture would persist longer than other kinds of fabric, that the suggestion of structure would evince a more basic durability of form. That said, it is unlikely that Issey Miyake or his creative teams understood, when pioneering the experimental uses of polyester in the ’70s, the seemingly undesirable consequences of the proliferation of these petroleum-based materials. Washing polyester in a washing machine sheds endless quantities of tiny fibers which themselves are likely quite toxic (though people argue to what extent, seemingly depending on whether they stand to make money from the sale of plastic-based textiles or the sale of some alternative fabric). These tiny fibers also absorb other toxins, leach into waterways, build up inside small animals which are then eaten by larger animals until they are eaten by us. Yesterday’s Pleats are in tomorrow’s seafood (microplastics, it seems, tend to proliferate in mollusks like scallops, mussels and oysters, fancy girl food and treif alike). Of all the myriad toxicities of microplastics, I was most tickled to learn that they are estrogenic and lower sperm count; the red-pilled among us might argue that the Pleats themselves made me trans.
Thich Nhat Hanh famously urged disciples to consider that reincarnation is quite literal; a recurring image in his writing and speech is how a cloud never really dies, it turns to rain. He says that this is true of people as well, that after they stop living, they continue on in a different form. I turned this idea over and over again in my mind when TNH died earlier this year, meditating on how he lives on in my thinking. And I thought about it again when Issey Miyake died, since, more than any other person, clothes made by companies associated with his name comprise what I wear each day. The things people make and do persist in teachings and materials and traces—not just abstractly but concretely, binding us to history, and enabling us to enact the imagination and wishes of those who came before us. The things we crave and put in and on our bodies have social and material records. A failure to grasp the total interconnected reality is a symptom of being consumed oneself by fear or desire, or both.
I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea of social change through individual consumer activism, partly because it fails to see totality, instead recursively reasserting that personal choice—rather than collective and systemic action—is the primary existential building block of meaning. I also just don’t think it works that well. Despite the proliferation of images—of microplastics, plastic islands, aquatic birds with guts full of household containers—to raise consumer awareness, consumerism itself may be the ill, rather than the means of change: we won’t shop our way out of this one. Petroleum companies are also reportedly planning on increasing plastic production in the coming decades to keep profits stable, anticipating a dwindling demand for gasoline. It’s worth noting also that recycled PET (the basis for the admittedly stunning Issey Miyake 132 5. line launched in 2010) and bioPET (made from plants rather than petroleum) are no less toxic than standard PET.
In defense of my collection, I will say that the polyester-based Issey Miyake pieces last forever, especially if you take care of them. The way they age, as they shed more and more microplastic, is special—first scratchier, then eventually softer, holding their shape still but becoming more delicate, wispier. I hold onto the clothes like any treasured material thing, because they offer me a promise of coherence, a sense of something as abstract as the self and as undeniably concrete as the world in relation to one another. Is there a physical object closer to dharma than an article of clothing designed to be comfortable and elegant when worn by someone with any sort of body? Pleats are a thing I love, in part because they made me feel lovable and in part because they were made by someone who had a deep reverence for the power and meaning of things. The obsolescence—and toxicity—of their material is one of several strange truths about them.
Eventually we will all be dead and the things we held onto will leach out into the world. The Pleats also don’t literally last forever; passively, PET takes give or take 500 years to break down. In an auspicious turn, in 2016, Japanese researchers discovered bacteria that eat soft PET in up to three weeks and hard PET in around three years. It breaks the plastic down into its component chemical parts, which can eventually be processed into carbon dioxide. This is just one of various microorganisms recently discovered to perform such feats of decomposition. Such bacteria may cause problems (if materials previously believed to resist biodegradation can now be eaten, our cars and soda bottles might leak) but will inevitably solve problems as well. As those tending towards the political left perennially insist, the forces which seem most destabilizing to the current order of things may also be the ones that redeem us. When I die, bury me in Issey, with a colony of plastic-eating bacteria.
In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, four teenage girls—all different heights, weights, shapes—find a singular pair of jeans in a thrift shop that magically fits each of them perfectly. They come out of the dressing room in quick succession, and marvel at their luck. “It’s scientifically impossible,” they gasp.
I loved the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, though this scene couldn’t have been further from my own teenage experience buying jeans. My body seemed to repel denim. I’d go to the Gap every so often with hopes that my luck might change, but the outcome was always the same: an hour in a dressing room, trying on pair after pair of ill-fitting pants, nearing tears and leaving empty-handed. I spent years avoiding jeans and, really, pants in general so that I wouldn’t have to repeat the dressing-room experience. I hated the way they made me feel—out of shape, and out of place.
But I still loved clothes. I turned to thrifting, where size tags didn’t matter. I learned to sew and made dresses and blouses and skirts tailored to my own body and its quirks. Freed from the constraints of contemporary fast fashion stores, I began to dress outlandishly, playing with colors and patterns and textures that made me stand out from the other girls at school. I spent years painstakingly curating a wardrobe—a collection of clothing that made me feel like myself. Pants were few and far between.
And then, in the last few years, getting dressed started to lose its luster. When I moved from Los Angeles to New York, I shipped nearly all my thrifted and handmade clothing in a single cardboard box, which the USPS lost forever. I grew away from the loud clothes I loved as a teen and found myself needing more “practical” garments that I could wear for a long day of office work. During the pandemic, I began to grow out of what I still loved to wear and suddenly felt uncomfortable in the pieces that once made me feel empowered. Garments I’d dug out of thrift store bins and held onto for years went back to thrift store bins. Clothes I’d sewn to perfectly fit my body now felt alien. My wardrobe withered. The excitement I used to feel opening my closet mutated into a kind of small dread. Finally my shrinking clothing collection pushes me, for the first time in years, to go shopping at non-thrift stores. Though I hate to admit it, I need basics—pieces I could throw on without worry; garments fit to my 25-year-old body instead of my 18-year-old one.
In desperation, I spend a weekend in Soho—perusing a half-dozen fast fashion stores, all of which leave me feeling frustrated, disappointed, or even worse, bored. But on my way out of the neighborhood, I pass by a Pleats Please. I hesitate before going in (I can’t afford anything in the store, and I’m embarrassed to be wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and shorts). But when I open the door and step inside, two beautiful people in Miyake’s signature pleats greet me warmly, gesturing to the rows of racks.
Although I’ve spent many hours scrolling through Miyake’s designs online for inspiration, I’ve never seen any Pleats Please clothing up close before. In person, the garments are both organic and futuristic, silky and structured in a mesmerizing way. There’s not much color, but they still draw your eye. I feel joyful, falling in love with the novelty of these pieces, their fun and their ease. Flipping through hangers, I’m reminded of what my closet felt like many years ago: full of excitement and possibility. Everything in the store—the clothes, the accessories, the people—appears to be ageless and genderless. I don’t dare to try anything on, in case I fall for a pair of pants worth nearly half my rent. Instead, I linger. I listen as a woman with an angular bob asks one of the cashiers if the dress she’s holding is available in a size three, instead of the size two she’s holding. “We only have the one, unfortunately,” she’s told, “but the difference between a two and a three is only half an inch in length.” Satisfied, she walks to a dressing room (the Pleats Please sizing, apparently, is based largely on height instead of width). At the same time, another cashier delivers a lecture on care for a Pleats Please purchase: everything is machine washable, foldable, packable, durable. “I’ve been washing and wearing these pants for years,” they declare. “They’re easy.”
At home several hours later, I open Depop to look for Pleats Please pants at a discount. Nothing available is in my budget, but I click around anyway. I ‘heart’ a vintage pink-and-orange two-piece suit going for $495. “Absolutely magical set that can fit most sizes,” the description reads. “I’m 6 foot and it fits me and my girlfriend who is 5’3.” I regret not trying anything on earlier to feel the comfort and construction against my skin. I resolve to come back, though, maybe bringing three friends with me. Miyake’s pants will fit each of us—adjusting, magically, to our styles and bodies just like the Sisterhood jeans. Split four ways, maybe we can even afford them.
In Rohmer’s movies in general, formless form makes the content seem real.
Did he surrender his critical edge in order to be amazed by Velveeta and Cheerios? That will always be the question.
I can’t help but hope for some other, better New York.
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