Between Body and Matter: The Strange Beauty of Issey Miyake’s Urushi Body

The answer is beautiful, slightly alien and unmistakably Miyake. Part bustier, part sculpture, part object you might imagine discovering in an impossible archaeological dig, URUSHI BODY sits around the torso as though it has been grown. It traces the body’s curves without simply following them, creating a hard, lacquered counterpoint to the softness of skin and fabric. The result: a frame for the human form. And that idea the body as something to be framed, questioned, expanded and occasionally left alone, has been quietly running through Issey Miyake for decades. Long before fashion became obsessed with “sculptural silhouettes”, Issey Miyake was already treating clothing as a conversation between material and body. In the 1980s, his BODYWORKS experiments took that conversation somewhere delightfully strange. Miyake moulded unconventional substances, including plastic, paper and wire around the torso. The point was to discover what clothing could become when you stopped assuming that a garment had to behave like a garment.

Today, under the creative direction of Satoshi Kondo, Issey Miyake continues to push at the same productive tension between body, material and movement. The house has evolved enormously since Miyake established his Paris based fashion in the 1970s. Its curiosity remains remarkably intact: how little can you impose on the body before something completely new begins to happen? URUSHI BODY is a particularly gorgeous answer. Its making is almost as fascinating as its appearance. Large sheets of handmade Echizen washi paper, produced by craftspeople in Fukui, are torn by hand and layered with adhesive over three dimensional moulds. The moulds themselves are created using contemporary 3D-printing technology. The resulting forms then travel to Kyoto, where artisans apply layers of traditional lacquer, urushi, transforming the fragile warmth of paper into something rigid, durable and subtly glossy.

The house of Issey Miyake treats the opposition between tradition and technology as two different tools in the same laboratory. URUSHI BODY makes that philosophy visible, if you look at one you might initially think: beautiful bustier. Look a little longer and the question becomes stranger: is this actually clothing? The bustier announces itself. It creates a boundary between skin and fabric, body and object. That relationship is at the heart of the Issey Miyake Autumn Winter 2026/27 collection, CREATING, ALLOWING, presented in Paris in March. The idea behind it is surprisingly radical: how much should a designer actually control? And what might happen if, instead of imposing a final form on a material, you allow the material and the person wearing it to participate in creating the result? The collection played with this idea in numerous ways. There were garments that allowed the body to create their three dimensional form, including pieces in which a single piece of fabric was zipped into a tube and shaped through wearing. URUSHI BODY sits beautifully within all of this because it appears, at first, to be the most controlled object in the room. It is hard. It is precise. It has been moulded, layered, lacquered and finished. And yet once it meets the body, it changes meaning.

Miyake’s experiments were often about returning to very old questions, What is cloth? What is the body? What does it mean to wear something? And asking them with new materials and new technology. The house became famous for transforming the relationship between a flat piece of cloth and the three dimensional body. Pleating became movement, fabric could be folded, stretched, compressed and engineered so that the wearer became part of the design process. Later, the world came to know PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE, but the wider Miyake universe has always been bigger than one technique or one instantly recognisable silhouette. It is a way of thinking.
There is also something deliciously rebellious about putting a hard shell around the body in an era when fashion has spent years worshipping softness. URUSHI BODY simply says: here is the body and here is this object. Let them negotiate. For those who want to see that negotiation up close, the house is presenting a special exhibition in Japan titled “URUSHI BODY: Between Body and Matter.” From September 1, 2026 the exhibition will be presented at Issey Miyake locations in Japan, including ISSEY MIYAKE GINZA /445, ISSEY MIYAKE SEMBA and ISSEY MIYAKE KYOTO.

“Between Body and Matter” is a pretty perfect title. Because that is exactly where these pieces live.

Not quite clothing.
Not quite sculpture.
Not quite protection.
Not quite adornment.
And definitely not quite the conventional idea of a bustier.

For those who would rather experience the object on their own bodies, URUSHI BODY will be available in stores from September 2026. The bustier arrives in three wonderfully moody shades: dark red, black and dark blue. They sound like the beginning of a very good autumn wardrobe. Colours that seem designed to sit somewhere between clothing and atmosphere.