Issey Miyake Homme Plissé Basics Jacket – Black

A tailored shoulder is the single hardest thing to fake. It is the part of a jacket that normally requires canvas, padding, and a sleevehead set by hand, and it is what makes a jacket read as tailoring rather than as a shirt with buttons. This one has the shoulder and none of the apparatus. Cut straight through the body from heat-set pleated polyester, with a two-button front and two pockets, it borrows the entire grammar of a conventional jacket and then omits everything that conventionally produces it. The consequence is a garment that photographs like tailoring and wears like a cardigan: no weight across the back, no restriction through the arm, nothing to press and nothing to have cleaned. Basics is an accurate name. This is the plainest thing the line makes, and it is plain in the specific way that takes effort.

The colour

Black is what makes the tailoring reference land, since a black two-button jacket reads as formalwear before the eye registers that the surface is pleated. That double take is most of the pleasure of wearing it.

A jacket with a genuine tailored shoulder that weighs almost nothing and needs no maintenance is the most useful garment in this line. The straight fit is what keeps it from reading as a novelty.

100% polyester, made in the Philippines, in black. Straight fit, tailored shoulder, two-button closure, two pockets.

Straight through the body. Pleated cloth opens as it is worn, so it is more accommodating than a structured jacket of the same nominal size. The shoulder holds its line; nothing else in the garment resists you.

Black and jacket-shaped, it goes anywhere a blazer goes and several places one does not. Over a pleated trouser from the line it becomes a full look in one cloth.

The pleats are heat-set into the polyester and are permanent, so it washes without losing them. Wash at 30°C or below in a laundry net on a short cycle, or press gently by hand, and never tumble dry, iron, steam, or dry clean. Store it rolled along the direction of the pleats rather than hung, which is the opposite of what one does with a jacket and is correct here. Our fabric care guide covers polyester and technical cloth.

The Basics Trousers and the Trousers in Plum are the matching bottoms, and the Tailored Pleats 2 is the more formal jacket in the line. There is more on the house on the Issey Miyake designer page. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.