Issey Miyake Pressed Flora Pleats Shirt

The Pressed Flora series takes the logic of the pressed botanical specimen onto cloth, and this is the entry that commits hardest to the idea by refusing to be pretty about it. The print is asparagus: long, vertical, slightly awkward stems, closer to a herbarium sheet than to a floral. On a pleated ground that turns out to be exactly right, because the vertical of the pleat and the vertical of the stem agree with each other, and the print reads as though it grew along the folds rather than being laid across them. The shirt itself is deliberately slight, short-sleeved and lightweight, which keeps the whole thing from tipping into costume. It is a botanical print for people who find botanical prints tiresome.

Choosing asparagus over a flower is the decision that makes this shirt interesting, and the way the vertical print sits with the vertical pleat is not an accident.

Print and pleat working together rather than competing is a considered piece of Issey Miyake design, and the Pressed Flora series is where the house's botanical work lives.

100% polyester, made in Japan, in Asparagus. Lightweight and pleated, with short sleeves and an asparagus print.

Lightweight and short-sleeved. Pleated cloth opens out in wearing and holds more material than the flat garment suggests, so it is more generous in motion than at rest.

Green and graphic, it wants a plain neutral beneath and beside it. Cream, charcoal, and black all work; anything else patterned does not.

The pleats are heat-set into the polyester and are permanent, so it 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 press gently by hand, and never to tumble dry, iron, steam, or dry clean, since the pleats are not heat-resistant. Store it rolled along the direction of the pleats. Our fabric care guide covers polyester and technical cloth.

The Pressed Flora Skirt and the Pressed Flora Bandana are the skirt and the bandana from it. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.