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Dai Fujiwara

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Japanese designer, co-creator of Issey Miyake's A-POC and ISSEY MIYAKE creative director 2007–2011; now runs the studio DAIFUJIWARA.

Dai Fujiwara ran ISSEY MIYAKE's Paris collections as creative director between 2007 and 2011, but that title is the smaller half of his record. The work he matters for began nine years earlier, in 1998, when Issey Miyake started a project called A-POC and made Fujiwara his collaborator on it. A-POC was not a collection or a print; it was an attempt to replace the sequence by which a garment is made. It took the Good Design Grand Award in 2000 and was exhibited at the Vitra Design Museum in Berlin in 2001 under the joint title A-POC MAKING: ISSEY MIYAKE & DAI FUJIWARA. (Miyake Design Studio; ISSEY MIYAKE INC.)

His appointment is routinely misdated, in both directions. Japanese trade coverage of his departure describes him as having been appointed in 2006 and having served roughly five years, and WWD Japan's collection index records him as taking over womenswear in 2006. The company's own corporate chronology is more specific: in February 2007 it names him creative director of ISSEY MIYAKE from the Autumn/Winter 2007–08 collection, and brackets his run as Autumn/Winter 2007–08 to Autumn/Winter 2011–12. The likeliest reading is that the decision was taken in 2006, inside the gap left by Naoki Takizawa, whose last collection was Spring/Summer 2007, and that Fujiwara's first collection under the title was shown in 2007. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.; Fashionsnap; WWD Japan)

Ink painting, textiles, and the route into Miyake

Fujiwara was born in 1967 and grew up in the Shōnan coastal area of Kanagawa Prefecture, which he has since made the base of his own studio; his profile for the Roppongi Mirai Kaigi platform gives Kanagawa as his birthplace, while Wikidata records Tokyo. He entered Tama Art University in 1989 and majored in textiles, choosing cloth, he has said, because it is a universal medium through which a message reaches society easily. In 1992 he took a year out of his degree to study ink landscape painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, drawn by a continental relationship to nature unlike that of an island country. He graduated in 1994 and joined Miyake Design Studio, the company behind ISSEY MIYAKE, that year. (AXIS; Roppongi Mirai Kaigi)

He arrived at a fashion house as a textile person and a painter rather than as a pattern cutter, which is why his central project starts at the thread and the machine rather than at the silhouette.

A-POC: the garment made before it is cut

Ordinary clothing is made in three separate stages. Cloth is woven or knitted; a pattern is laid over it and the pieces are cut out, producing offcuts that are thrown away; the pieces are then sewn together. A-POC, short for A Piece of Cloth, collapses all three. A computer-programmed industrial knitting machine takes a single continuous thread and produces a long tube of cloth in one uninterrupted run. The garment is already inside that tube: the outlines of body, sleeves, neck and hem have been knitted into the structure of the cloth as it forms, and the yarn and stitch are engineered so that the edges will not unravel when they are cut. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.; Miyake Design Studio)

The buyer finishes the object. Taking scissors to the tube along the knitted lines releases a dress, a top, a skirt, socks and a hat from one continuous piece, each one already hemmed by the way it was made. Cutting a sleeve short or a hem high is a decision made after purchase, not a size ordered from a rail, and the same tube yields a different wardrobe depending on where the scissors go. Nothing is left over, because there is no cutting waste to leave: the pattern has become a program rather than a shape laid on top of fabric. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.)

Two qualifications keep this accurate. The system was demonstrated at its most radical in the exhibition and runway pieces — the long uncut bolt of cloth from which garments emerge is the image that made A-POC famous — while much of what was actually sold arrived cut. And A-POC was Miyake's project; Fujiwara was the person who developed it with him and then carried it, which is how the Vitra Design Museum billed the 2001 show under both names and how the Tokyo Axis Gallery billed its 2003 exhibition, Nan-nano? A-POC MIYAKE ISSEY + FUJIWARA DAI. (Miyake Design Studio)

A-POC opened as a project in 1998 and started as a sellable line in February 2000; the work brought Fujiwara the Mainichi Design Award in 2003, and the piece the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 2006 is known as A-POC Queen. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.; Miyake Design Studio; Roppongi Mirai Kaigi)

Creative director: research as the collection

When Fujiwara took the mainline in 2007, he did not leave A-POC behind. In July of that year the company folded A-POC into ISSEY MIYAKE as a design solution under the name A-POC INSIDE, so the technology stopped being a separate label and became a method available to the main collection. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.; Fashion Press)

His collections were built from outside research rather than from mood. The clearest case is the Autumn/Winter 2010–11 collection, Poincaré Odyssey, shown in Paris in March 2010 and built on topology — the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a shape that survive stretching and bending. Fujiwara and his team went to meet the American mathematician William Thurston, whose geometrisation conjecture had supplied the key to the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, and took the eight geometries Thurston's conjecture classifies as their starting point. Sadayoshi Kojima of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kazushi Ahara of Meiji University taught the studio the concepts; Kojima's verdict was that the designers and pattern cutters had thoroughly grasped them. Thurston went to Paris to see the show. (Nikkei Science)

Alongside that, he used the house's resources on materials that were disappearing — endangered Japanese fibres and craft techniques connected back to industrial capability and returned to the collection as new cloth. (AXIS)

His last collection, Autumn/Winter 2011–12, was titled Rondo #2 after the musical form in which a main theme returns between variations. Its method was one strip of tape folded repeatedly in different ways to generate dresses, skirts and jackets, with houndstooth pixellated into repeating motifs; folded paper tapes at the entrance showed visitors the technique before they saw the clothes. Resolving the form that far upstream cuts both process steps and material waste. "I wanted to show that a minimum of material can produce many different expressions," Fujiwara said of it. (AXIS)

Leaving, and why

The departure was notified to trade contacts in writing on 18 February 2011 and reported publicly that week. Fujiwara had treated succession as part of the job from the start; having reached his fifth year, he judged that the younger designers and the team around him had grown enough to take the work over, and moved the design function to them. The final show took place in Paris — Vogue Japan's announcement said 4 March, AXIS's report afterwards said 5 March — and he stayed on as creative adviser, supporting the incoming team through to the Spring/Summer 2012 collection. (Fashionsnap; Vogue Japan; AXIS)

The new structure was announced on 19 May 2011: Yoshiyuki Miyamae, who had joined Miyake Design Studio in 2001 and come up through the A-POC team that Miyake and Fujiwara led, took womenswear from the Spring/Summer 2012 collection, while menswear passed to a design team and was renamed ISSEY MIYAKE MEN. (AFPBB News / MODE PRESS)

Colour hunting and the independent practice

Fujiwara had set up his own company, DAIFUJIWARA, in 2008, and it became his main vehicle after 2011; his Roppongi Mirai Kaigi profile dates the studio to 2009, his museum biography and a 2026 AXIS profile to 2008. Its method is カラーハンティング (colour hunting) — mixing watercolour on the spot until it matches a colour actually present in a landscape or a city, and recording the match on a paper chip, so a palette is collected as evidence rather than chosen from a fan deck. (AXIS; Chigasaki City Museum of Art)

The method carried a full exhibition at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT in Tokyo, Colour Hunting: Design Begins with Colour, which Fujiwara directed from 21 June to 6 October 2013 with participation from research institutes, companies and fourteen schools, and Camper among its sponsors. He has since applied colour hunting for Muji and Camper, given an Enoden train carriage a livery drawn from the colours of Shōnan, and held his first solo museum exhibition, human nature, at the Chigasaki City Museum of Art in 2021. (21_21 DESIGN SIGHT; Chigasaki City Museum of Art)

As of September 2026 he is a professor at Tama Art University and a researcher at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science, and continues to work as a design consultant across corporate, academic and regional projects — most recently as general director of the Quantum Art Festival, an outreach programme run with Hitachi's research group across four editions between December 2022 and February 2026, and on a noren curtain project for temples begun as Noto earthquake recovery work. (AXIS; Roppongi Mirai Kaigi)

Reading and dating the work

The useful boundary is a season, not a year. The company's own record brackets Fujiwara's creative direction as Autumn/Winter 2007–08 through Autumn/Winter 2011–12 for the mainline ISSEY MIYAKE women's and men's collections. Anything labelled ISSEY MIYAKE and dated to a season before Autumn/Winter 2007–08 belongs to Naoki Takizawa's period, and anything from Spring/Summer 2012 onward is Yoshiyuki Miyamae's. Retail delivery outlives a tenure, so a garment bought in late 2011 or early 2012 may still be from his final collections: a purchase date cannot prove authorship, and a season can. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.)

An A-POC label is a different signal from a mainline one. A-POC ran as its own line from February 2000 until July 2007, when it was absorbed into ISSEY MIYAKE as A-POC INSIDE; a piece carrying the standalone A-POC branding therefore sits inside that seven-year window, while A-POC INSIDE construction inside a mainline garment points to 2007 onward. Do not read either as the same thing as A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, the line relaunched in 2021 under Miyamae, which continues the idea long after Fujiwara left. For how the house's lines relate to one another, see how the ISSEY MIYAKE lines work. (ISSEY MIYAKE INC.)

One more trap for a resale listing: menswear was renamed ISSEY MIYAKE MEN only in 2011, after he left, so that wordmark is not his. And a tubular knitted A-POC piece may have been cut by a previous owner rather than at the factory — an unexpectedly short sleeve or hem on an A-POC garment is often the system working as designed, not damage. (AFPBB News / MODE PRESS; ISSEY MIYAKE INC.)

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