Issey Miyake revamps hippie tie-dye for men

THOMAS ADAMSON

PARIS (AP) — Issey Miyake's new menswear designer Yusuke Takahashi describes his spring-summer 2014 display as "amazement for things, shapes, color and motions."

Thursday's collection in Paris saw checks, bright cobalts, ultramarines, yellows, greens, pinks and reds burst onto the catwalk — dominating the shape of the loose silhouettes. But the musings with pattern and color are common territory for the famed French-Japanese house.

If there was any "amazement" to be found in this 35-piece show it was more in the designer's revamp of old school hippie tie-dye styles.

Issey Miyake is a house always at the fore in state-of-the-art fabric technologies.

Here, alongside the traditional twist dyeing that was applied to bleaching, Takahashi used a "batik" technique from Java, where layers of anti-dying glue are printed on cloth that's dyed. The result is a complex and unique pattern.

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