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Yoshiyuki Miyamae

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Japanese designer who led the ISSEY MIYAKE Paris collection from 2011 to 2019 and has directed A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE since its 2021 launch.

Yoshiyuki Miyamae designed the ISSEY MIYAKE Paris collection for eight years, from Spring/Summer 2012 to Autumn/Winter 2019-20, and since March 2021 has directed A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE. The second appointment is easy to misread as a demotion from a runway line to a side project. It is closer to the opposite: Miyamae joined the Miyake Design Studio in 2001 and built his early career inside A-POC, the house's most technically radical undertaking, and the 2019 handover of the main line to Satoshi Kondo did not remove him from the company — the announcement said explicitly that he would continue his research and development work and lead a new internal project. That project became A-POC ABLE. (Fashionsnap, 3 September 2019; Fashionsnap, 8 March 2021)

The shape of his career is therefore a loop rather than a ladder. He left the A-POC side of the studio for the house's most exposed job, spent eight years applying industrial process research to a Paris show schedule, and then returned to the process work with a brand of his own to run.

Tokyo, 2001, and the fourth chair

Miyamae was born in Tokyo in 1976. According to the programme note for the MBS documentary series Jōnetsu Tairiku, which followed him through the three months before his debut show, Issey Miyake had noticed his ability while Miyamae was still at high school; he joined the Miyake Design Studio in 2001 and built his career as the right hand of Dai Fujiwara, the house's third designer. He was appointed the fourth in 2011, at thirty-five — an age at which, as the broadcaster put it, taking charge of an established house is rare anywhere in the world. (Jōnetsu Tairiku, MBS, 16 October 2011)

That lineage matters for reading the clothes. ISSEY MIYAKE is one of the few houses where the founder deliberately handed the main line to a succession of named designers while still alive: Naoki Takizawa, then Fujiwara, then Miyamae, then Kondo. Fashionsnap reported the appointment on 19 May 2011, in an announcement that also covered a renaming of the men's line. Miyamae's first collection was Spring/Summer 2012, shown in Paris that autumn. (Fashionsnap, 19 May 2011)

In November 2014, three years into the job, he was honoured at the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix ceremony; Fashionsnap's report is headlined around his having produced results in that time. The surviving version of that page carries only the photo gallery, not the body text, so it does not itself name the prize category, and this profile does not assert one. (Fashionsnap, 4 November 2014)

What A-POC actually is

A-POC stands for A Piece of Cloth — 一枚の布 (ichimai no nuno) — and it began in 1998 as Issey Miyake's proposal for how clothes might be made in the twenty-first century. The idea is not a print, a fabric or a silhouette but a change to the order of operations. An industrial knitting or weaving machine is programmed so that a single thread produces a continuous length of cloth in which the garment already exists: the outlines of the pieces, and the structure that lets them hold together, are built into the weave. The cloth is engineered so that a cut edge at cuff or hem does not unravel, which means the wearer can take scissors to it and decide the final length themselves. The house states the concept as transforming the process of making clothes and proposing a form of design in which the wearer participates. (ISSEY MIYAKE, A-POC ABLE concept; ISSEY MIYAKE, PRODUCT TYPES)

The second half of that sentence is the part resale listings usually lose. A-POC is a garment sold deliberately unfinished, and the buyer completes it. The series that carries this most directly, TYPE-A, dates from A-POC's origin and is still being updated. (ISSEY MIYAKE, PRODUCT TYPES)

Steam Stretch

The process most closely associated with Miyamae is Steam Stretch: high-temperature steam is applied to the cloth, shrinking it in a controlled way to produce a stretch material whose pleat geometry is designed rather than pressed in afterwards. Because the shrinkage can be directed, the pleats need not run as parallel lines; the house describes the TYPE-O series as an investigation of three-dimensional pleat forms not previously achievable, producing polygonal volumes that resolve against the body while staying light and elastic. In TYPE-S, the same technique is used as engineering rather than surface: creases are placed at the waist and around the knee so that stretch appears exactly where the body bends. (Fashionsnap, 8 March 2021; ISSEY MIYAKE, PRODUCT TYPES)

The three-dimensional development of the process belongs to the main-line years, and is often referred to as 3D Steam Stretch. Here the accessible record is thin: Fashionsnap filed its report on the Spring/Summer 2015 show under a URL naming 3D steam, but the page now carries only its photographs, so a precise account of how the name was used season by season cannot be reconstructed from it. What is documented is the technique itself, and its continuity into the work Miyamae now directs. (Fashionsnap, 27 September 2014)

Engineering instead of design

A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE launched on 13 March 2021, with a shop opening the same day at FROM-1st in Minami-Aoyama. The first two series were TYPE-O, on Steam Stretch, and TYPE-U, made from a polyester with a shape memory: roll a soft cuff back and it stays where it is put. The ABLE in the name refers to extending what A-POC can be made to do. (Fashionsnap, 8 March 2021)

Miyamae rebuilt the working method as well as the products. A Japanese fashion house normally divides garment-making into 企画 (kikaku, design), 技術 (gijutsu, patternmaking) and textiles. A-POC ABLE instead runs an engineering team in which one person, or a small group, carries a garment from the first idea through material research, form and detail, and on into setting up production. Miyamae's argument for the structure is that a brief to change the process itself cannot be executed inside a division of labour built for the existing one. He also describes two kinds of designer: those with a defined personal world who want it realised exactly, and those who want to see something they have not seen. He places himself firmly in the second group, and says that a finished sketch handed to technicians as capable as the studio's tends to close the work down rather than open it. (ISSEY MIYAKE, DIALOGUES Episode 0)

The TYPE series

A-POC ABLE sorts its output into two families, and the distinction is the most useful thing to know about the brand. PRODUCT TYPES carry letters and name a process: TYPE-A for the original cut-to-finish knit, TYPE-O and TYPE-S for Steam Stretch, TYPE-U for shape memory, TYPE-P for the printed-adhesive Baked Stretch pleat, TYPE-B for bonded geometric texture, TYPE-F for the framework method of weaving a garment's design elements into one cloth, and further letters for knit, embossing, product dyeing and goods. PROJECT TYPES carry Roman numerals and name a collaborator from outside fashion. (ISSEY MIYAKE, PRODUCT TYPES; ISSEY MIYAKE, PROJECT TYPES)

TYPE-I was the first, and it came from Sony. Sony's Creative Center designer Takayuki Kitahara introduced the team to Triporous™, a porous carbon material Sony developed from discarded rice husks; kneading it into the yarn before the cloth is woven produces a black that conventional dyeing cannot reach and that fades less over time. The first three pieces — a jacket, centre-creased trousers and a polo shirt — went on sale on 14 May 2021. The project later extended into TYPE-I MM project, made with the conductor Michiyoshi Inoue: Triporous black cloth given Steam Stretch pleating, cut as stand-collar jackets, trousers and dresses with monotone stripes like staves, to ask how formal a performing musician's clothes have to be before they stop allowing movement. (ISSEY MIYAKE, TYPE-Ⅰ; ISSEY MIYAKE, TYPE-Ⅰ MM project; Fashionsnap, 13 May 2021)

The numerals have since run to at least sixteen, among them the artist Tatsuo Miyajima (TYPE-II), the shoe studio Magarimono (TYPE-III), the biomaterials company Spiber (TYPE-XI), the painter Tomokazu Matsuyama (TYPE-XII) and the Swiss design studio Atelier Oï (TYPE-XIII). In August 2026 the Aoyama flagship expanded within the same building, reopening on 4 September 2026 across three floors designed by Tokujin Yoshioka, with the basement given over to a gallery, A-POC SPACE. As of September 2026 Miyamae remains the brand's designer. (ISSEY MIYAKE, PROJECT TYPES; Fashionsnap, 7 August 2026)

Reading and dating the work

Three separations do most of the work when identifying a garment.

First, A-POC is not A-POC ABLE. A-POC began in 1998 under Issey Miyake, with Dai Fujiwara closely associated with its development; A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE is a distinct brand launched in March 2021 under Miyamae. Listings that describe a late-1990s or 2000s A-POC piece as Miyamae's work are wrong by two decades, and the reverse error is just as common. (ISSEY MIYAKE, A-POC ABLE concept)

Second, a TYPE code is not a season. A PRODUCT TYPE letter tells you which process made the cloth and nothing about when. A PROJECT TYPE numeral plus a three-digit item number — TYPE-Ⅰ 007, for instance — identifies the collaboration and the piece within it. Match both against the brand's own PRODUCT TYPES and PROJECT TYPES pages before trusting a date in a listing. (ISSEY MIYAKE, PROJECT TYPES)

Third, a tenure date cannot prove authorship. Miyamae's main-line seasons run from Spring/Summer 2012 to Autumn/Winter 2019-20, but retail delivery outlives a tenure and stock sells through long after a designer has moved, so an ISSEY MIYAKE garment bought in 2020 may belong to either his or Kondo's work. The label itself will not tell you; the season will. (Fashionsnap, 8 March 2021)

One further caution about pleats. Steam-formed pleats on an A-POC ABLE piece are not the heat-set garment pleating of PLEATS PLEASE, and neither is HOMME PLISSÉ; the processes differ and so do the labels. For how the house's lines separate, see how the ISSEY MIYAKE lines relate to one another.

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