Issey Miyake Pressed Flora Skirt

Pressing flowers is an old and slightly melancholy practice: you flatten something living to keep its shape after it is gone. Translating that onto cloth means accepting the thing that makes pressed flowers worth keeping, which is that no two are alike. The house has done exactly that here, and the consequence is built into how the skirt is made: each one is unique. That is a rare admission for a manufacturer to make and a rare property for a garment to have. It means the placement, the density, and the way the botanical forms fall across the satin are particular to the one skirt rather than repeated across a run, so the thing you have is not a copy of a design but an instance of a process. The colour is named Ranunculus, after the flower, and the satin ground is what makes the imagery read: a matte cloth would absorb it, while satin holds light around the shapes and lifts them off the surface.

A garment that cannot be exactly reproduced, and where the maker says so plainly, is worth having for that reason alone. The satin ground is what turns the process into something you can see.

Letting a process rather than a drawing determine what a garment finally looks like is a habit that runs through Issey Miyake's work, and this is one of the most literal instances of it.

Made in Japan, in Ranunculus. A satin-faced cloth carrying a pressed flower design, with each example made unique by the manufacturing process.

A satin skirt with fluid rather than structured fall. Because the pressed floral placement varies between examples, the way the design sits on the body varies too, which is part of the object rather than a defect in it.

The imagery is the whole garment, so nothing patterned should go near it. A plain solid above, ideally something matte, gives the satin somewhere to shine against.

A satin face and a printed botanical design are both vulnerable to heat, which glazes the one and can lift the other. Treat it gently, keep heat away from it entirely, and where in doubt use a specialist cleaner. Our fabric care guide is the place to start.

The Pressed Flora Pleats Shirt and the Pressed Flora Bandana are the shirt and the bandana from it. The Physiotype Satin handles a botanical print as graphic pattern instead. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.