Satoshi Kondo

Satoshi Kondo (近藤悟史) has designed the women's collection of ISSEY MIYAKE since 3 September 2019, when the house announced him as successor to Yoshiyuki Miyamae. He is the fifth designer to hold the role since founder Issey Miyake stepped back from designing the line himself: Naoki Takizawa, then Dai Fujiwara from 2006, then Miyamae from 2012, then Kondo. (Tokyo Weekender; WWD Japan)

It is easy to flatten that lineage into a single anonymous "house style," since every ISSEY MIYAKE designer after the founder works under his name rather than their own. In practice each predecessor pursued a legibly different set of ideas within the same production system, and Kondo's tenure has been organised around a fairly specific question: what a single piece of cloth does once a moving body is inside it. Kondo designs only the women's collection. Pleats Please Issey Miyake, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake and me Issey Miyake are produced by their own design teams, and the ISSEY MIYAKE men's collection has been led separately by Yusuke Takahashi since 2012. (WWD Japan)

From a pleating line to the founder's own studio

Kondo was born in 1984. He graduated from Ueda Yasuko Fashion College in Osaka in 2007 and joined ISSEY MIYAKE Inc. the same year, working across the design teams of Pleats Please Issey Miyake and Homme Plissé Issey Miyake — the company's two pleating-based lines — for roughly a decade. (Fashionsnap; WWD Japan)

In 2017 he transferred to Miyake Design Studio, the company's internal creative office, where he worked directly under Issey Miyake and, by his own account, absorbed the founder's habit of returning constantly to first principles rather than working from a fixed aesthetic. (WWD Japan; The Fashion Post) Two years later, on 3 September 2019, the company announced that Kondo would design the ISSEY MIYAKE women's collection, succeeding Miyamae, who had led it from spring/summer 2012 through his final, 2019–20 autumn/winter show. (Fashionsnap; WWD Japan)

Kondo has said his own designer individuality is not something he pursues directly, but something that surfaces through ISSEY MIYAKE's existing, exacting production process — extensive fitting, repeated trials with textile partners, and a habit of testing an idea physically rather than settling it on paper before that. He has also described drawing his source material from outside fashion altogether — art, film, and a general awareness of the society the clothes will be worn in — reasoning that without an outside reference, a collection risks becoming "mere self-satisfaction." (Thefashionography)

Asked what he understood beauty to mean in his work, Kondo has said he does not treat novelty as a requirement — that a garment can be beautiful without being new — and that returning to the body as "the most elemental foundation" is what lets consistently beautiful work follow. He describes wrapping a body in a single piece of cloth as a method that deliberately leaves the final volume and drape unfixed: because bodies differ, the same construction produces a different silhouette on each wearer, and the garment is not considered complete until it is on someone. (JDN)

A Sense of Joy: the Paris debut

Kondo presented his first collection, A Sense of Joy, in Paris on 27 September 2019, for spring/summer 2020. The show opened with dresses appearing to descend from the ceiling — an effect he said came from imagining "how delightful it would be if wonderful clothing dropped from the sky" upon waking — constructed from pleats set first horizontally and then fanned outward, so that the pleating itself created a bounce timed to the wearer's movement rather than a static drape. (Fashionsnap; WWD Japan)

The collection also introduced the AIR series, garments cut from an ultra-thin, 100 per cent nylon fabric engineered for unusual breathability, which Kondo described as giving the wearer the sensation of "wearing air itself" — a synthetic material doing the opposite of what synthetic material is assumed to do. A second group, the HOLD series, ran in sky blue and earth-toned beige and carried a print depicting figures embracing, developed as the show's emotional centre. Several of the opening looks were built from a single square of fabric, cut as little as possible, continuing the founder's 一枚の布 (ichimai no nuno, "one piece of cloth") principle that treats minimal cutting as both an efficiency and an aesthetic. (Fashionsnap)

Movement was not incidental staging. Kondo worked with the American choreographer Daniel Ezralow to integrate dance through the show, saying he wanted "a collection that engaged with the body" rather than one presented on models walking a static line. (WWD Japan)

Movement as a design method

The debut set a pattern Kondo has repeated rather than a one-off gesture. For spring/summer 2023, A Form that Breathes, he again worked with a dance company — Rosas, the Belgian troupe associated with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — whose movement research informed silhouettes built through an "assemblage" method, combining separately developed forms into a single garment with minimal seaming. The collection also used seamless knit construction, which Kondo compared to "carving a body from stone," and incorporated a plant-based polyester fibre co-developed with the Japanese textile manufacturer Toray. (AXIS)

The following season, autumn/winter 2023–24, The Square and Beyond pushed the same logic toward geometry: garments named ENCLOTHE, ENTWINE and ENVISION were cut with minimal shapes from essentially rectangular cloth, fastened in places with small perforated stones rather than conventional closures, and left needing the wearer's own draping to complete their final form — construction that produces close to no fabric waste. (AXIS)

In between, spring/summer 2021's UNPACK THE COMPACT, shown as the pandemic reshaped how collections could be presented at all, took logistics and folding efficiency as its starting point, while autumn/winter 2021's 生まれたままで ("as it was born") worked from unworked natural forms — eggs, stones, shells — realised in undyed cloth and ink-wash techniques. (Fashionsnap) For autumn/winter 2024–25, What Has Always Been returned to a more archival kind of research: Kondo's team drew on historical Japanese texts, including the eighth-century poetry anthology Man'yōshū, to develop the season's palette and its ideas about colour and time. (AXIS)

Kondo's later collections have not depended on announcing a new fabric each season. Many return instead to construction — pleating, knitting and draping — while keeping a relatively stable material vocabulary. He describes trial and error as necessary, provided the team retains a fixed “axis,” the governing story against which each experiment is tested. By Autumn/Winter 2024–25, that method had developed across roughly a dozen collections under his direction. (Thefashionography; AXIS)

Working inside an anonymous name

Kondo works within a house whose designer's name never appears on the mainline label: the brand remains ISSEY MIYAKE regardless of who directs it. The studio's process also resists turning a single personality into the point of the collection. Kondo has described his individuality as something that “emerges naturally” through the work rather than something he sets out to impose, and recalls Issey Miyake urging the team to move towards the next unmade thing instead of repeating a success. His task is therefore to build a recognisable body of work without signing it in the conventional sense. (Thefashionography; The Fashion Post)

Reading a Kondo-era ISSEY MIYAKE piece

A label reading “ISSEY MIYAKE” identifies the house, not the designer or even the specific line. Pleats Please, Homme Plissé, me Issey Miyake and the mainline collection are made by separate teams and can all carry variants of the founder's name. To place a garment in Kondo's tenure, match it to a mainline womenswear collection from Spring/Summer 2020 onward — A Sense of Joy, UNPACK THE COMPACT, 生まれたままで, A Form that Breathes, The Square and Beyond and What Has Always Been among them. Pleating, bright colour or synthetic fabric cannot establish authorship because all recur across lines Kondo does not design. The house publishes no comparable public line-letter code for the mainline, making collection imagery and season records the safest evidence. For the full structure, see how the ISSEY MIYAKE lines fit together. (WWD Japan; AXIS)

References

• Fashionsnap. "「イッセイ ミヤケ」が新体制、デザイナーは宮前義之から近藤悟史に交代." 3 September 2019.
• WWD Japan. "「イッセイ ミヤケ」がデザイナー交代 「プリーツ プリーズ」などを経験した近藤悟史が就任." 3 September 2019.
• WWD Japan. "空からドレスが降ってきた！ 「イッセイ ミヤケ」新デザイナー近藤悟史が振り返るデビューショー." 2019.
• Fashionsnap. "身体と布のあいだに――新デザイナー近藤悟史による「イッセイ ミヤケ」が始動 20年春夏コレクションを紐解く." 2019.
• Fashionsnap. "イッセイ ミヤケ、未来への一歩 デザイナー近藤悟史が三宅一生から引き継いでいくこと." 2022.
• AXIS Web. "ISSEY MIYAKE 2024/25年秋冬コレクション「What Has Always Been」 前編｜美と歓びを探求するデザイナー 近藤悟史の現在地." October 2024.
• The Fashion Post. "「淡々と堂々と、服をつくる」 イッセイ ミヤケ 近藤悟史." Portraits.
• Thefashionography. "Satoshi Kondo — Designer, Bio, News." Accessed September 2026.
• Kelly Wetherille. "Dai Fujiwara." Tokyo Weekender, 3 July 2009.
• Wikidata. "Satoshi Kondo (Q87546239)." Accessed September 2026.