Forget Japan, We Have Issey Miyake Store at Home (EXCLUSIVE)
Shopping in Japan is on another level. You’ve got Moncler stores wearing literal puffer coats, a Bode store within a store, and Issey Miyake boutiques that are also art galleries. As we recently noted after visiting the above locations, you just don’t get shops like this anywhere else. Except, with Issey Miyake, you kinda do.
The ultra-innovative fashion label is upping sticks in New York, moving from its recently shuttered Tribeca store to a flashy new flagship in the Cass Gilbert-designed New York Life Building on the corner of Madison Avenue (the one with the 22-karat gold leaf pyramid on the top).
“It's not easy to make audacity disappear, and it's not easy to make retail last. We tried both here," Jing Liu, co-founder of Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu, the architecture studio that designed the store, tells Highsnobiety. Liu’s firm created a huge glass staircase that sits in the center of the 13,000 square-foot retail space (this will be the single biggest Miyake store outside of Japan) and punctuated the space with floor-to-ceiling industrial metal beams while exposing the building’s original large curved Beaux-Arts-style windows.
It’s an ambitious design, yet the spacious store feels polished and almost minimal. Its audacity disappears, to use Liu’s phrasing.
Issey Miyake carries the remnants of its old store to this new one, producing tables from the glass wall panels of the Tribeca flagship, alongside a feature previously only found in its Japanese locations: a gallery space.
The gallery acts as “an overseas platform for sharing the brand’s craftsmanship and cultural values,” according to Issey Miyake. Essentially, it’ll include work by artists the brand admires — like, say, the Japanese ceramic artist Shoji Kamoda, whose work was part of an Issey Miyake exhibition in Tokyo — and highlight its famously innovative manufacturing.
Want to see how Issey Miyake creates shape-shifting baseball caps through heat-sensitive threads? Or how its patented pleating process involves a heat-press and specially made Polyester? That’s the kind of stuff you can expect from the Miyake flagship’s gallery, which may be as much a draw as the clothes themselves, which'll include New York flagship-exclusive pieces celebrating the shop's opening.
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