Paris Fashion Week: The Shape of Things to Come at Issey Miyake as Fabric Takes Flight and Finds Its Own Form

Vivid colour and ballooning forms were highlights of the Issey Miyake show in Paris for the new SS27 womenswear collection. Cover picture by Filippo Fior. 

Issey Miyake's artistic director Satoshi Kondo brought a sense of movement and play to the Spring/Summer 2027 collection, filling the Paris Dojo with inflated silhouettes, floating pleats, sheer layers and brilliant colour. From ballooning ripstop coats to sculptural moulded tops and fluid knits, the clothes constantly shift between structure and softness. Behind this spirited wardrobe is Kondo’s fascination with what happens between the body and the garment, a space that gives fabric room to move, expand and change with its wearer. Story by Ambrogio de Lauro. Photographs by Andrea Adriani and Filippo Fior

The billowing fabric and dancers that

opened the Paris Issey Miyake show. 

SATOSHI Kondo began with a simple experiment: a vast sheet of lightweight cloth, lifted into the air and allowed to reveal its own possibilities. Before there were coats, dresses or pleats, there was movement, the fabric floating, collapsing, stretching and catching the air.

That experiment became Kondo’s latest exploration of ma, the Japanese concept of the space between. But rather than approaching the idea as an abstract aesthetic principle, Issey Miyake gives it a physical presence. The space between body and garment becomes the place where clothing comes alive.

The collection was introduced at the Paris Dojo through an extraordinary opening performance. Eleven dancers, led by Tess Voelker, moved beneath and against an enormous piece of pale fabric, transforming it into something that appeared simultaneously like a sail, a wave and a breathing organism. The choreography established the central proposition before a single look appeared: clothes need not remain fixed around the body; they can respond to it.

Kondo and his team had worked with a ten-by-ten-metre piece of lightweight fabric before beginning the garment-making process, watching how it behaved in motion and against the skin. “It’s the ma in its purest form,” Kondo said. “That play really serves as the source of this collection.” The comment explains much of the resulting wardrobe, where experimentation precedes construction and the material itself becomes an active participant in the design.

Dancers moved beneath an enormous piece of pale fabric, transforming it into something that appeared simultaneously like a sail, a wave and a breathing organism

Ballooning jackets and skirts swelled

into fluiid, rotund shapes with ripstops.

Volume is consequently liberated from weight. Ballooning jackets and skirts swell into rounded forms using lightweight ripstop, while sheer garments billow around the body rather than enclosing it. Fine, translucent yarns create another kind of movement, allowing colour and skin to shift beneath the surface. Horizontal pleats animate the clothes further, bouncing and changing with every step.

The collection also demonstrates how far that philosophy can be pushed into three-dimensional form. Developed with Wacoal Corp, the Cocoon series uses three-dimensionally moulded forms to blur the boundary between garment and anatomy, drawing on the image of a silkworm creating its protective cocoon. Elsewhere, Fluiglyph translates the movement of water into seamless knitwear, while hand-twisted Balloon pieces preserve the sense of fabric being manipulated directly by hand.

Even the colour palette participates in this atmosphere of movement. Azure, raspberry, lemon yellow and pink appear across transparent and opaque surfaces, while hand-marbled organza produces the soft iridescence of soap bubbles. The effect is exuberant without overwhelming the underlying discipline of the clothes.

What distinguishes the collection is the sense that the garments have not been forced into their final forms. They appear discovered rather than imposed. A sleeve lifts, a pleat rebounds, a ballooned silhouette expands; the wearer completes the design simply by moving through it.

For Kondo, the space between body and fabric is therefore not an absence. It is where the action happens. This collection makes that invisible territory visible, through air, movement, volume and the remarkable ability of cloth to behave as though it has a life of its own.

See the full collection below from Issey Miyake Spring/Summer 2027 in Paris