Pleats please

What happens when two highly experienced senior designers decide to collaborate to promote their work? An excellent example of this can be found in the work of Taku Satoh and Issey Miyake.

In 2012, the graphic designer Taku Satoh created an advertising campaign running over several months for the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake’s label Pleats Please. To give you some background, Miyake developed a novel technique in the late 1980s using pleated polyester, hence the label Pleats Please. The colour possibilities with polyester is also almost endless. The technique was a way to create thousands of very sharp overlapping folds in textiles, giving the material extra volume, texture and a different dynamic, especially when worn by a moving and living human body.

The campaign created by Satoh is a series of posters depicting a range of what appears to be edible and drinkable delicacies, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the original Pleats Please label. The images by Satoh were constructed from pleated textile, but depicting food and drink in the most vivid and stunning colours. It is a highly interesting play on synesthesia, where one sensory perception is crossing over to another. When we first see one of Satoh’s posters, you initially see for example fresh sushi. The hyper-real look forces your curiosity towards a second and third glance and your mind eventually becomes conscious of the fact that you are looking at textiles. All the designs are minimalistically clean, giving them visual punch and emphasis of the virtual materiality, which in turn reinforces the properties of the original Pleats Please label. While Miyake’s work is intended to be worn on the outside of the body, Satoh’s work can be imagined to be appreciated by the inside of your body.

Satoh’s poster campaign won the Japan Graphic Designers Association award for 2013.The posters will go on display again in June at the Tokyo Midtown Design Hub.