The version of this story that gets repeated is the easy one. Issey Miyake invented machine-washable pleats, called the line Pleats Please, and the clothes turned out to be the closest thing to a universal garment that late-century fashion ever managed. All true, and all skipping the part that is actually interesting, which is that the launch year, 1993, is not really when the work happened. The work happened in the four preceding years, mostly in a small factory called Polytex, mostly out of sight.

The starting point is 1988, the year of A-ŪN at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, an exhibition that Miyake himself describes in the Taschen book as a kind of personal closure. "After the exhibition, I became convinced that I had already accomplished everything that I could," he says. "And so I began to think about a new journey upon which to embark." That is a strange thing for a designer at the top of his practice to say in public, and it tells you something about the restlessness that produced what came next.

What came next was not a collection. It was a question about pleats. The existing pleated garment was a Fortuny problem: silk, fragile, beautiful, unwearable in any normal sense, requiring careful storage and the kind of domestic labour that mid-century women had spent two generations escaping from. Miyake wanted the opposite. He wanted a pleat that survived a washing machine, that folded into a suitcase, that did not need to be respected. So the team at Polytex began the long part of the work, turning a polyester filament into a fabric with memory and then inventing a process to give that memory a shape.

The process is the bit people skip over because it sounds dull on paper, but the dullness is the point. Garments are cut and sewn at two and a half to three times the intended size. They are sandwiched between sheets of paper, fed through a heat press, and emerge shrunken into the finished article with the pleats fixed permanently in place. Cutting, basting, sewing, pleating, and inspecting are all done by hand at Polytex, a small operation that had begun life in 1967 with about sixty workers. None of this is glamorous. None of it photographs well. It is the labour the finished garment is meant to make invisible.

The other element nobody mentions enough is dance. In 1991, two years before the public launch, Miyake produced pleated costumes for William Forsythe's The Loss of Small Detail at the Frankfurt Ballet. That was the test. Dancers are merciless on clothes; they ask things of fabric that a Paris runway never will. If a pleated polyester survives a Forsythe rehearsal, it will survive a commute. The ballet costume was the engineering prototype dressed up as art.

By 1993, when Pleats Please launched as a separate diffusion line, the hard part was already finished. What the public got was the easy bit, the buy-it-and-go object, the rolled-up dress that came out of a suitcase unwrinkled. The mythology grew around the result and not the process, which is how mythologies usually go. I have a slight allergy to treating any garment as an ethical achievement, but I will say this: clothes that genuinely free their wearer from the rituals of maintenance are rarer than the industry pretends, and most of the imitators that followed Pleats Please copied the shape and skipped the chemistry. The shape without the polyester is just a pleated dress that you still have to baby.

The thing the four hidden years bought Miyake was not aesthetic. It was permission to stop performing care.

Sources: