It’s not bad news everywhere for retailers. Japanese label Issey Miyake (now designed by Dai Fujiwara) is doing well enough to open a new door in Paris. The new store, on the luxurious Rue Royale, will stock men’s and women’s Issey Miyake, the HaaT and Cauliflower lines, watches, fragrances and Pleats Please accessories.
Ahhh, that fragrance. Chandler Burr, perfume critic for the NYT says “Issey Miyake’s signature fragrance, L’Eau d’Issey, is an international success, and in the industry it is famous — and notorious — for being designed to convey the idea of . . . water. Which, in essence, smells of nothing. L’Eau d’Issey is pure concept: cleanliness, dryness, perhaps a slight coolness. Light, light, light.”
That light-filled fragrance was so inspirational that it was one of the first perfumes I asked for…as a high school student. It felt like fancier version of cK One. For me,Pleats Please always calls to mind one very elegant octogenarian patron of the arts I knew as a child, who lived in Michigan in a commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright home, and was always exquisitely dressed in exclusively Issey Miyake.
