Issey Miyake Hatching Pleats 2 Dress

Hatching is a drawing term, the technique of building tone out of crossed sets of parallel lines, and it is the right name for what this cloth does. Pleating it twice, in two directions, produces a surface where the two sets interfere with each other and the eye reads the result as shading rather than as texture. The garment is consequently darker in some places and lighter in others without any dye being involved. Cut as an airy midi with a scoop neck, it is light enough that the double pleating adds volume rather than weight, and the whole dress moves as a single soft mass. The "2" in the name marks it as the second working of the idea, and the scoop neck is what distinguishes it from the rest of the family.

Double pleating gets you tonal variation out of a single colour, which is a genuinely elegant solution and one almost nobody attempts.

Pleating is the technique most associated with Issey Miyake, and hatching is what happens when it is run twice.

100% polyester, made in Japan, in black. Double-pleated, airy, and light in the hand.

Midi length with a scoop neck. Pleated garments size unusually, since the pleating compresses a much larger piece of cloth into a smaller garment and it opens out as you wear it. Read it as generous, and expect it to move considerably more than its flat dimensions suggest.

It is a complete outfit on its own and resists layering, because anything on top interrupts the hatch. A hard flat shoe against all that softness is the most interesting contrast.

The pleats are heat-set into the polyester, which is why they are permanent and why the dress washes without losing them. Miyake's own instruction is to wash at 30°C or below in a laundry net on a short cycle, or to press gently by hand, and never to tumble dry, iron, steam, or dry clean, since the pleats themselves are not heat-resistant. Store it rolled along the direction of the pleats rather than on a hanger. Our fabric care guide covers polyester and technical cloth.

The Hatching Pleats Skirt and the Hatching Pleats Jacket are the skirt and the jacket from it, and the Hatching Bottoms take the same double pleating into a trouser. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.