Issey Miyake Pleats Please Thermal Foods Madame-T

Printing a pleated cloth is a more interesting problem than printing a flat one, because the viewer never sees the whole image at once. The folds hide roughly half the surface at any angle, so an all-over print becomes a set of vertical slices that shift and recombine as the wearer moves, and the pattern is never quite the same twice. A vibrant, densely coloured print like this one is exactly the right subject for that treatment: something restrained would be lost, while something this saturated survives being cut into bands and reassembled. Thermal Foods is the print name, and it is a properly odd one, which suits a house that has never been much interested in being tasteful for its own sake.

Sizing and dimensions

One size. It compresses very small and opens very large, so its apparent scale is a choice.

A pleated print behaves differently from a flat print and this is a bold enough one to show it. The Madame-T's several configurations mean you can choose how much of the pattern to reveal.

The avant-garde register this print belongs to is a long-running strand in Issey Miyake's work, and the Madame-T is the studio's most adaptable accessory.

100% polyester, made in Japan, in pink. Pleated, with an all-over print, and an opening through the centre.

The print is the outfit's only pattern. Everything else plain. Because the configurations expose different amounts of it, this is a piece you can dial up or down depending on the day.

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. Our fabric care guide covers polyester and technical cloth.

The Photon Madame-T Stole in yellow and the Basic Madame-T Stole in black are the same object in another colour and print. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.