The Design Snob's Secret Wardrobe

How Pleats Please Issey Miyake became the unofficial uniform of those in the know.

- JESSICA IREDALE

Few classes of creative people are as doctrinaire about dress as architects and interior designers. Le Corbusier favored double-breasted suits. Pierre Yovanovitch swears by Comme des Garçons, as do Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci of Milan’s Dimore Studio. Rafael de Cárdenas became familiar with Pleats Please Issey Miyake during his time at Calvin Klein, where he worked in the ’90s as a men’s wear designer.

“Calvin always flirted toward the Japanese,” de Cárdenas says. “He loved Yohji Yamamoto and Miyake.” Personally, de Cárdenas thought the look matronly, but then something changed, and the Brooklyn-based architect found himself wearing the line more and more, specifically the midcalf shorts of its men’s offshoot, Homme Plissé, clothes immediately recognizable for their origami-like texture and boxy silhouette. At Totokaelo once, he bought a pair of pants that taper from large pleats at the top to compact, narrow folds at the ankle, and he never looked back.

“My partner asked me if I was wearing my mom’s clothes. She’s big into the elegant sack thing,” de Cárdenas tells T&C. “But it’s a good way to look smart when you’re actually wearing sweatpants.”

Mom jokes aside, de Cárdenas is but one Pleats Please disciple; the inner sanctum of the tribe are found in the design, art, and fashion worlds. Zaha Hadid was a fan. Toshiko Mori and David Chipperfield designed stores for Miyake, and Frank Gehry did the New York flagship on Hudson Street. The late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, writing on the designer’s sway with this cohort, once compared Miyake to “a visual philosopher of modern movement, an architect of traveling light.”