Issey Miyake, designer

In this first design for the Pleats Please Guest Artist series (1996–1998), fashion designer Issey Miyake collaborated with photographer and video artist Yasumasa Morimura to create a garment that encourages an “interactive relationship between art and the person who admires it.” Morimura’s collage image on the dress front exemplifies his selfdescribed practice of “wearing Western art history” and pointedly answers Miyake’s call. Shrouded in red mesh, he inverts a self-portrait in a devotional pose at the feet of a nude woman sampled from Ingres’s Neoclassical painting La Source (1856). Further complicated by the expanding pleats and
the wearer’s moving body, this complex image questions binary divisions such as those between self and other, male and female, East and West.