Cycling to school, Issey Miyake was seven years old when United States dropped the atom bomb. Due to the bombing he lost most of his family. His mother was severely burned, although she carried on working as a schoolteacher for four years before she died.

At the age of ten, Miyake developed bone marrow disease, the effects of which he suffers hitherto. Reluctant to talk about it, Miyake prefers to dwell on the good memories from childhood: a beautiful bridge in his hometown, which he cites as his first consciousness of design; pressing against shop windows to admire the mannequins.

Still, backstage at his Autumn/Winter 1995-96 show in Paris, more than a hundred assistants wore white T-shirts printed with a dove of peace to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. As Mark Holborn has written: "Miyake's creativity exists not in detachment from the shadows of Japanese history, but in an inescapable response to such experience. His career corresponds exactly to the recovery of the nation, and it is there in Japan, after both Paris and America, that his own sense of definition is established. “

In 1964, Miyake graduated from Tama Art University in Tokyo with a degree in graphic design. Not long after he arrived in Paris, enrolled in the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and worked first with Guy Laroche, then for Givenchy, before moving to New York, where he was employed by Geoffrey Beene. “I was faced with the heavy tradition that was French high society,” the designer has said of his first experience in French fashion capital, in an interview with Susannah Frankel, “I used to escape to London once a month to relax. That was my place. The King's Road, the fantastic Biba, the shepherd's pie, the musicals!”

It was to Tokyo, and to a country undergoing enormous cultural and economic changes, that Miyake returned to set up his design studio in 1970. This was the year of the Osaka Expo, and a time when creativity was burgeoning. Japan was a nation at the height of its reconstruction under the gaze of symbols of its past.

Japan has over the centuries developed a sophisticated textile industry and, since World War II, has invested heavily in the regeneration of its manufacturing and industrial base. Although Miyake relied on his extensive studies of traditional Japanese dyeing and weaving techniques to create clothes with contemporary appearances, he also worked with Japanese synthetic-fibre manufacturers. In the second half of the 1980s, these new synthetic' fabrics made from polyester were attracting worldwide attention.