Irving Penn on Issey Miyake

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After his return to New York in 1946, Penn worked with other fashion and home magazines as well as Vogue, juggling fashion, portraiture, and ethnographic photography. Photographing indigenous peoples in their natural surroundings had long been a dream of Penn's. On Vogue's dime, he travelled to Spain, Peru, Bangladesh, Hawaii, Manila, The Philippines, India, and other exotic locations for fashion shoots. On these occasions, he also completed personal projects. In the 1960s Penn, who had saved the negatives from his photoshoots over the years, was already looking for ways to preserve his artistic legacy. Looking to reprint his photographs, he experimented with emerging technology and spent long hours in the library and the studio trying to come up with the best method. In 1964, he rediscovered the platinum print, a method widely used in the 19 th century, which enabled him to manipulate and enhance the richness of tone in his earlier compositions. Over the next thirty years, Penn laboriously reprinted all his new photographs and much of the earlier work as high-quality prints. These printed images created a new audience for his fashion and portrait photographs. Museums and galleries began to recognize Penn's work for its quality and formal mastery of the medium. To this audience, his alignment with the avant-garde art aesthetic was fully visible. The designer invited the photographer to document and interpret future collections, but so respectful was one master of the other, that Miyake was never in the room with Penn when the pictures were being taken. “I did not want to interfere with his freedom,” Miyake explains. “I wanted to see what he would do!” Nude No 150 depicts the lower half of a female body shaped differently from the ideal that appears in Penn's fashion shoots. The triangular thighs seem to sprout directly from the spherical abdomen. The overexposed negative creates an almost abstract image comprised of shapes and sinuous lines closer to a drawing or a sculpture. Penn would soon use this device in his fashion photographs. While supporting himself as a fashion photographer, Penn engaged in side projects that interested him as an artist. Earthly Bodies series was among the first of these side projects. At work, Penn's job was to emphasize and exaggerate the ideal female form. Earthly Bodies presents us with an antidote to these "heavenly" bodies Penn was obliged to photograph on a daily basis, resisting this ideal. Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden, June 16–September 2, 2012. Traveled to: Kumu Art Museum, Talinn, Estonia, June 14–October 6, 2013.

Mr. Miyake's pieces focused on functionality; even when rolled up into balls or knots they would never be wrinkled or crushed, and could be machine washed. Francois Guillot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Penn, Irving. Le Bain: Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco (exhibition catalogue). Paris: Maison Européenne de la photographie, 1997. Irving Penn: The Flavour of France, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, October 19, 2017–January 6, 2018. Drawing on Tanizaki’s emphasis on the subtlety of light and shadow in the Japanese home, Miyake embarked on a collaboration with the Italian product design company Artemide. Together they produced IN-EI (‘shadow’ in Japanese), a series of folded lampshades that, when opened, create twisting geometric sculptures. Like the ‘132 5’ dress (above), the lampshades strike a distinctive balance between mathematical precision and organic forms. The example in the V&A collection is named Katatsumuri, the Japanese word for snail. Kilian, Michael. "Glamor and Grit: Penn Photos Draw Big Crowds at Smithsonian." Chicago Tribune (April 19, 1990): 14.Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals—Images 1947–1975, Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY, September 9–October 11, 1977. Traveled to: Salt Lark Art Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 2–December 2, 1979; Marlborough Gallery, London, May 20–June 20, 1981. In addition to his editorial and advertising work, Penn was also a master printmaker. Beginning in 1964, he pioneered a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints, a 19th century print process to which he applied 20th century materials. Maddow, Ben. Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977. The term itself directly translates to “Japanese dance”, and although it does not refer to dancing in general, it explicitly refers to the kabuki buyo form of dance that is performed in theaters. Is Issey Miyake Still Popular? Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs 1938–2000. With introduction by John Szarkowski. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2001.

Sustainability is one of fashion’s biggest challenges. A by-product of Miyake’s signature pleats is the many sheets of paper between which the garments are sandwiched for the heat pressing process. In the production process, the paper is pleated with the fabric, leaving behind hundreds of metres of unwanted crinkly paper. Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Printemps des arts de Monte Carlo (exhibition catalogue). Paris: Beba, 1986. And just like the abstract look of Miyake’s fashion lines, the models would strike a variety of abstract poses. Some even insist that it was Irving Penn’s work with Miyake that inspired Madonna’s 1990 song “Vogue”. Nihon BuyoCallaway, Nicholas and Irving Penn. Issey Miyake: Photographs by Irving Penn. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1988. Hambourg, Maria Morris and Jeff L. Rosenheim. Irving Penn: Le Centenaire (exhibition catalogue). Paris: RMN Editions, 2017. Naudet, Jean-Jaques. "Irving Penn: Entrez dans un Univers Magique." Paris Match (October 10, 1991): 96–105. There are superficial similarities between Noguchi’s iconic lanterns and Miyake’s IN-EI lights, but Miyake’s work – created applying the same mathematical theories of 3D design as in his 132 5. collection – has a significantly different structure.

Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (exhibition catalogue). Poughkeepsie, New York: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2019: 120, illustrated. Mr. Miyake with models in 1984. He was one of the first Japanese designers to show in Paris. Pierre Guillaud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Imrie, Tim. "Irving Penn at the V & A." British Journal of Photography 134 (Febrary 13, 1987): 190–91. Photography in the Twentieth Century, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, February 1967. Traveled to Canada, July 30, 1967­–February 18,1968.

Jodidio, Philip. "No. 500 (Twenty artists and architects each contribute a recent work to the 500th issue of Connaissance des Arts)." Connaissance des Arts no. 500 (November 1993): 68–97. Miyake kept the sorrows of his childhood private until 2009, and remained secretive about his personal life: his closest companions were his work collaborators, especially the studio president, Midori Kitamura, a former model. Irving Penn: (opens in a new window) Masterpieces by Irving Penn, Les Franciscaines, Deauville, France, March 4–May 28, 2023.

Grundberg, Andy. Alexey Brodovitch. Documents of American Design Series. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989. Irving Penn: Ethnos, Bernheimer Fine Art Photography, Munich, Germany, December 2, 2011–January 28, 2012. Miyake and the Miyake Design Studio have always been characterized as experimenters—working either with new materials, natural or synthetic, or else mixing materials and finding ways of making them more supple, shiny, or more textured. “Fabric is like the grain in wood, you can’t go against it,” Miyake told Time magazine in 1986. “You know what I like to do sometimes? I like to close my eyes and let the fabric tell me what to do.” While fashion photography remained Penn's primary source of income, during the 1940s and '50s, he also ventured into portraiture, especially the group portrait, a genre that offered "a welcome balance to the fashion diet at Vogue". Ballet Theater and The Twelve Most Photographed Models (both from 1947) demonstrate his early mastery of the genre. In 1953, Penn opened his own studio devoted to advertising and commercial photography, and other side projects. Madoff, Steven. "Irving Penn: At the National Museum of American Art." Art News 89 (Summer 1990): 179.

Irving Penn Regards the Works of Issey Miyake, Ginza Graphic Gallery, Tokyo, December 24–December 28, 1999.