How Homme Plissé Fits Into Issey Miyake’s New Menswear Strategy

Issey Miyake’s fastest-growing label, Homme Plissé, is staging a fashion presentation and exhibition tonight here at Pitti Uomo as part of a shakeup to the brand’s menswear strategy.

Having ceded its Paris catwalk slot to the late Issey-san’s equally cherished IM Men, Homme Plissé is set to “travel around the world to present its clothing in places and at events where it has never been before,” the company announced in March. Florence is its first stop.

“Homme Plissé is what we call a product brand: as such, it is not focused on fashion and trends. Thereafter, it makes sense for us to skip the catwalk for different actions: the Paris shows require endless novelty while Homme Plissé is about simple design for daily life, and endless fine tuning of items meant for everyday use,” said Satoshi Kondo, who speaks for the team that designs the line, a few days ago in Milan, where preparations for the Pitti show were being held in a vast light-flooded room.

“Product brand” is a term that is repeated throughout the conversation. Homme Plissé’s offering is more akin to industrial than fashion design, the output of a chorus, not a single creative director. And as Kondo speaks, the rest of the team is at his side: a sort of collective with a range of ages and roles from textile research to design to retail.

“There is a pragmatic and utilitarian spirit to what we do: men of different ages and body types can wear Homme Plissé in all moments of their life, from morning to night, from business to leisure,” Kondo explained. “As we keep growing and getting attention, we look for new challenges and for other ways to communicate who we are outside of the circles that traditionally attend fashion weeks. It is important for us to connect with the local communities.”

Homme Plissé was launched in Japan by Issey Miyake in 2013, and entered the international market a couple of years later. The core of the collection is the regularly pleated, matte and sturdy polyester fabric that took Issey-san and his team many years to perfect (and that, incidentally, makes Homme Plissé completely different from Pleats Please). But right from the start, the collection encompassed a range of fabrics, weights and categories.

Success came slowly, at first, but in recent years demand for the label has shot up (see the number of copies that have flooded the high street). Still, the company says it has no intentions of cashing in on the moment, which is a strategy as much as it is a production constraint.

“There is a huge demand for Homme Plissé at the moment, and we are very aware of that. But we don’t want to grow too much — not least because we can’t,” said Kondo. “Even if we wanted to, we could not double production. We work with our partner factories, who have worked with us since the beginning, and there is a limit to what they can do. Everything takes time, and we certainly prefer the slow road.”

The new strategy, dubbed “open studio,” involves staging roving presentations without a fixed cadence, in locations around the world that inform the design process. The collection to be presented tonight in Florence, for instance, has been developed in dialogue with Italy, with colours ranging from “jambon pink” and “duomo beige” to “zucchini green” and “Venice boat brown.”

“We did not want anything too literal or too monumental in our rendering of the country,” explained Kondo as we flipped through the pages of a book filled with images — walls, landscapes, stones, vegetables and a slice of prosciutto — assembled over three research trips to Italy. “True to the Homme Plissé spirit, we are attracted by the mundane and the everyday.”

The idea to start with Florence was, in part, due to Pitti Uomo, which has been courting Homme Plissé for a long time. Italy, too, is one of Issey Miyake’s key markets outside of Japan. Then there are stylistic reasons, “We are fascinated by the classicism of Italian men, especially as you see them in Firenze during Pitti, so we took this as an occasion to explore the jacket as a pillar and a shape.”

“What we aim at with ‘open studio’ is to bring new people in, from different worlds, and show them not only the collection, but also how items can be used, adapted, explored,” said Kondo. “We are bringing the collection close to our customers not to increase sales, even though those will certainly benefit from this move, rather to open the doors of our studio and reveal what’s behind the product.”