Issey Miyake's Pleats Please line launched in 1993, four years after he decided he had finished with everything he already knew how to do. The 1988 exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris was a survey of his work to that point. He later told his long-time collaborator Midori Kitamura that the show had given him the unsettling feeling of completion. Most designers would have taken the prize and kept producing. Miyake decided he needed a new departure.

The new direction came from polyester. He had picked up a pleated polyester-silk scarf and noticed that the pleats held permanently because the synthetic fibre had a thermoplastic memory. Heat could be used not as an enemy of cloth but as a tool that locked in shape. The team spent four years working out how to scale that observation into a clothing line. Makiko Minagawa, the textile designer who had been with Miyake since 1970, did most of the materials research. The fabric they ended up with was lightweight, washable, and cheap enough to make the project worth doing at retail.

The process was the inversion of how pleating had been done for centuries. Mariano Fortuny's Delphos dresses from the early twentieth century were made of silk that had been pleated first and then cut and sewn into the garment, with all the maintenance and fragility that implied. Miyake's team did it the other way around. The garment was constructed first, at roughly three times its intended finished size. It was then sandwiched between two layers of paper and fed into a heat-press. The press shrank the garment, set the pleats, and finalised the silhouette in a single operation. The fabric came out with permanent texture you could wash, scrunch up into a corner of a suitcase, and pull out wearable.

The technique was tested first on dancers rather than fashion clients. In 1991 William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet performed The Loss of Small Detail in costumes Miyake had developed using the new method. The pleats held through sweat and the violent geometry of contemporary dance, and the fabric stayed light enough to move freely. Forsythe's dancers were, in effect, the prototypes Miyake sent out into the world to see whether the system worked under load, and it did.

When the line went on sale in 1993 it carried a quiet ideology underneath the engineering. Miyake had been shaped by the May 1968 student protests in Paris, and ever since had wanted to make clothing that worked for ordinary lives instead of the maintained, dry-cleaned, museum-grade pieces couture produced. Pleats Please was that ambition arriving with a price point a working woman could pay and a durability she did not need to baby. The garment did not announce itself as fashion. It announced itself as something you could own and wear and not think about until you wanted to.

The afterlife is unusual. Most innovations from the early nineties have either ascended into archive worship or quietly disappeared into the back of vintage shops. Pleats Please is still in production, sold from boutiques that look more or less the same as they did when the line opened, worn by women who have no particular interest in the history of the technique that made the garment possible. The pleating is no longer experimental, it is infrastructure.

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