Issey Miyake Homme Plissé Heather Pleats Pants

Heather is a colour made by mixing fibres rather than by dyeing cloth. Black and white threads are combined before weaving, so the grey that results is not a flat shade but an optical blend the eye assembles from two colours held at thread scale. That is a fundamentally different thing from a grey-dyed fabric, and it has a visible consequence: the surface has a faint granular life to it, never quite settling into one tone. Pleating that cloth adds a second scale of variation on top of the first, so you have thread-level mixing inside fold-level light and shadow. The trouser itself is deliberately practical, with two side pockets, a drawstring, and a front opening button, and it is light. All the interest is in the yarn.

Colour built at thread level behaves differently from colour applied to cloth, and pleating it puts two kinds of visual texture on top of each other. It is also simply a very useful grey trouser.

Constructing a colour rather than dyeing one is characteristic of how Issey Miyake's studio thinks about cloth.

100% polyester, made in Japan, in grey. A blended pattern created from dyed black and white thread, pleated, lightweight, with two side pockets, a drawstring, and a front opening button.

Lightweight, with a drawstring and a button front so the waist can be set precisely. Pleated cloth opens as it is worn.

A heather grey is one of the most useful colours there is and takes essentially anything. The granular surface means it does not read as flat corporate grey, which is what makes it wearable outside an office.

The pleats are heat-set into the polyester and are permanent, so they wash 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 rolled along the direction of the pleats. Our fabric care guide covers polyester and technical cloth.

The Drawing Press Trousers apply pattern as print rather than building it from yarn, and the Basics Trousers are the plain cut in the same line. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.