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Farewell then, Homme Plissé. After a diverting run, Issey Miyake HQ has decided to retire that brand from its Paris menswear show slot. Rest assured, however, that Plissé has not folded; it will be presented in a showroom in the immediate future.
Its runway replacement is IM Men, the final label in his stable launched by Issey Miyake himself before his death in 2022. It began in 2019 when Miyake gathered designers Sen Kawahara, Yuki Itakura, and Nobutaka Kobuyashi to work on the new project. They launched their first collection in Japan in 2021, then launched to retail globally in 2024. According to its release: “the brand’s intention for this collection is to express the creation of products that transcend all boundaries and bring new, liberating perspectives to many people through ideas born from a free mind.”
The show was held in a classic Paris venue, Le Réfectoire des Cordeliers. The first thing we noticed as we traipsed into the monastery were the two enormous robotic arms— not unlike those that once wielded runway spray cans for Alexander McQueen—that were placed within the space, and which each held a square black panel several meters aloft. When the models started walking, each arm began moving in delicate sweeps here and there which you eventually understood were mutually synchronized. At the beginning this distracted somewhat from the garments, but once we realized there was no Tiktok catnip in the offing, the raised black devices held aloft by human arms slowly lowered.
The clothes were romantically technical and generously volumed. The designers used perforations to create texture and contrast, and pleats to define and cinch. A great detail was the hood design cut from the collars of a coat on one side, and from the shoulder on the other. This created an asymmetry that masked one half of the wearer’s face in a particularly cool mysterious nomad style. Looks in artificial coated sheepskin featured such generously cut pants and sleeves that they rendered the silhouette into something more like abstract sculpture than homo sapiens.
Although this label’s starting point is the simple idea of a single piece of cloth—a finale gesture not photographed here featured the models running with such pieces held up as if to signal back to those gesturing robots—IM’s three designers generated many thoughtful complications. These complications generated largely handsome menswear, but sometimes trod a fine line between intricacy and convolutedness. This busyness made a relatively straightforward light overcoat in a gorgeous tangerine color that floated by seem like an act of minimalism. I’m here for IM Men, and the rest of the Miyake audience seemed pretty into it too. So let’s see where it goes.
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