Homme Plissé Issey Miyake opens Matisse dialogue at Ginza, Tokyo
The second iteration of Open Studio, conceived with London's Tate Modern and inspired by Henri Matisse's The Snail, arrives in Ginza this November as an immersive exploration of colour, movement and craft. A capsule collection and archival documentation reveal the studio's dialogue with one of modernism's most playful masterworks.
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Colour blooms across a white field: magenta, teal, orange, cobalt, burnt sienna and cadmium yellow, each shape a geometric fragment. Walk into the CUBE at Issey Miyake Ginza and you enter the visual language of Henri Matisse’s The Snail, the 1953 paper cut that seems to spiral outward with the artist’s own delight. Homme Plissé Issey Miyake has shaped this work into an exhibition that reads less like a retrospective and more like a conversation between two makers separated by decades but speaking the same colour forward, composition driven vocabulary.
The project began this September at Tate Modern in London, where the house presented the second edition of Open Studio in collaboration with the museum. A capsule collection emerged from that dialogue, alongside a dance performance choreographed to move across an interactive stage. From 13 November through 22 December, that same energy arrives in Tokyo at Issey Miyake Ginza’s CUBE space, presenting the creative process, the finished garments, and the spatial story that unfolded in London.
What strikes the eye is the refusal to simplify. Photographs reveal a space in which nothing is static: pleated panels in jewel tones float across walls and floor; white cubic forms sit as punctuation marks, their austere geometry pressing against the chromatic abundance; a visitor in black stands before a wall mounted tapestry of colour, their silhouette a study in contrast. Archival video documents the performance, the behind the scenes conversations, the thinking that shaped each piece. The exhibition becomes a kind of slow motion record of invention: here is how form begins, how colour argues with form, how a garment moves through space and time.
The plissé technique, Miyake’s structural signature, allows fabric to respond to movement and transform in light, letting the wearer sculpt their own silhouette. The Matisse connection—both artists treating colour and form as fundamental language rather than decoration—shapes every garment in the space. The capsule collection translates the paper cuts into pleated pieces in those vibrant tones, structured to suggest Matisse’s sense of movement. The plissé process holds colour intensely; the technique itself becomes a form of homage, a way of saying that modernism’s discoveries still matter, that a work made seventy years ago can still ignite new ideas.
The capsule collection itself, glimpsed through the garments on display and in the archival footage, translates Matisse’s paper cuts into wearable form. One can imagine pleated pieces in those vibrant tones, structured to move the way Matisse’s cut paper suggests movement. The plissé process allows the cloth to hold colour intensely; the technique itself becomes a form of homage, a way of saying that modernism’s discoveries still matter, that a piece of art made seventy years ago can still ignite new ideas.
The Ginza exhibition runs daily from 11:00 to 20:00 with no admission charge. Visitors encounter a body of work that examines how a design house thinks through the relationship between art, craft and the body, and what it means to make something beautiful.
Imagery courtesy of Homme Plissé Issey Miyake (@hommeplisse_isseymiyake).
