Fashion meets art: Issey Miyake's elegant collection at Paris Fashion Week redefined wearable art

Issey Miyake effortlessly blurred the lines between art and clothing, integrating sculptural designs with clothes.

The Paris Fashion Week collection felt soft and elemental, as if blown by the wind, and deceptively simple. That’s the art of Issey Miyake — cutting-edge techniques creating clothes that drift like clouds. Sound and look simple? The execution was anything but.

Issey Miyake's women's wear ready-to-wear is artistic. (AFP)

Artistic ambiguity

For fall, Satoshi Kondo on Friday embraced ambiguity, blurring the line between sculpture and wearability, structure and fluidity. Designed around the idea of a single piece of cloth, the collection continued Miyake’s legacy of transformation — garments that shift, adapt and invite the wearer to complete them. Inspired by Erwin Wurm’s performative sculptures, the show at Carrousel du Louvre saw models folding, bending, and reshaping their clothes, turning dressing into an act of creation.

Models present creations by designer Satoshi Kondo as part of his Fall/Winter 2025-2026 Women's ready-to-wear collection show for fashion house Issey Miyake during Paris Fashion Week in Paris.(REUTERS)

Precision and effortlessness coexisted in every piece. Jackets snapped into rigid curves yet moved with ease. Shirts twisted into new forms, sleeves and panels shifting unpredictably. Sheer pleats flickered with movement, distorting as the body walked. Knits, expected to be soft, were pressed into sharp, sculptural shapes. Paper-woven fabrics mimicked stone but flexed like fabric. Every material challenged expectation, resisting easy definition.

Transformation at the centre

The collection featured lively art.(REUTERS)

Transformation remained the house’s core language. A coat, folded like an accordion, could be worn multiple ways. Stripes warped through pleating, creating the illusion of movement. Even the footwear, designed with Camper, wrapped the foot like fabric, a shoe in constant flux.

Miyake has always played between extremes — ancient and futuristic, structured yet free, abstract yet deeply human. This season was no different. These weren’t garments that dictated, but garments that questioned. In their folds and fluidity, in their balance of form and formlessness, they whispered their quiet challenge: What, truly, is clothing?