‘I want to see something fresh’: Ronan Bouroullec on his colourful collaboration with Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

A ‘creative session’ is how the multidisciplinary French artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec describes his collaboration with Homme Plissé Issey Miyake, revealed at the Japanese brand’s show this past January in Paris. As the colour-soaked collection, which features Bouroullec’s expressive felt-tip drawings as prints, arrives in stores this week, Wallpaper* revisits a conversation with the artist held backstage at the Palais de Tokyo show.

The curving white walls of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo were hung with a series of garments adorned with the instinctive, abstract drawings of Ronan Bouroullec, the multidisciplinary designer and artist who creates these works as part of his daily practice (his tool is a set of Japanese felt-tip pens).

They provided the backdrop for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s latest menswear show, which featured Bouroullec’s work as prints across the collection, as well as inspiring its mood. Issey Miyake called it a ’creative session’ rather than a collaboration, an exchange of ideas built on Bouroullec’s previous relationship with the Issey Miyake brand (in 2000, he designed the interior of Issey Miyake’s A-POC store in Paris alongside his brother Erwan).

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s ‘creative session’ with Ronan Bouroullec

This is not to say that he jumped immediately at the opportunity, having been famously reticent to see these designs used on clothing or fabrics in the past (though last year, he collaborated with Kvadrat on a series of textiles which recalled the lines and textures of the pieces, which he largely sees as personal and meditative). ‘It’s like a trail that you walk every day until you arrive. You see when you’ve arrived, but you don’t remember what happened while you were walking,’ he told Wallpaper* at the time.

‘I’ve always had a lot of requests from fashion brands, and I always say no,’ Bouroullec says. ’I feel like fashion uses things, and then it goes in the garbage so quickly. But Issey Miyake is different, I know it as a brand. If anything, they started off being too respectful: I told them ”I don’t want you to be polite with me”. I wanted to see something fresh, where they were not seen as a decorative object but part of the design.’

Indeed, the resulting collection captured the artist’s intuitive approach with silhouettes wrapped around the body in colourful layers and flourishes of Bouroullec’s work appearing throughout. A series of asymmetric scarves, meanwhile, recalled the artist’s expressive, abstract motifs. The collection notes said that it was an exploration of how creative material (here, Bouroullec’s drawings) can be translated into clothing.

‘All the members of the design team are drawn to his work,’ a spokesperson for the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake team tells me backstage at the show. ‘We think there’s something really poetic and beautiful about it – you don’t just look at the artwork, you are imagining yourself diving into it. It was a creative, and inspiring, session for us. I think the scarves capture the essence of the collection – one of the design team members had the idea of actually wearing the drawings.’

’It’s been extremely interesting because it is like it’s like growing or building an exhibition or painting, colour after colour,’ says Bouroullec. ’All for just 15 minutes on the runway – it’s extraordinary.’

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s ‘creative session’ with Ronan Bouroullec is available now at Issey Miyake Brook Street, as well as stores in the US, Japan and Italy. It will be available in France later this month.

isseymiyake.com