Issey Miyake Squeeze Dress – Black

The technique the house calls "squeeze" does what it sounds like: the cloth is compressed until it holds a permanent crushed relief, so the texture is not printed on the surface or woven into it but pressed into its structure. The consequence is a garment with genuine depth. Light does not sit flat on it; it collects in the compressed valleys and lifts off the raised parts, and because the base cloth is soft and stretchable the whole relief flexes and shifts as the wearer moves. Static, it reads as a sculptural object with a worked surface. In motion, it reads as something closer to water. That combination, a hard-looking texture on a soft-behaving fabric, is the entire reason to want it, and it is very difficult to arrive at by any other route. The composition, a majority of cotton with polyester beside it, matters here: the cotton keeps the hand dry and matte, which stops the relief from reading as shine, and the polyester supplies the memory that holds the texture through wearing.

Texture that is structural rather than applied is the thing we look for hardest, because it is the thing that survives a decade of wearing. Compression built into the cloth cannot rub off or wash out the way a finish can.

Miyake's studio has spent its whole history making cloth do something before making a garment out of it, and the squeeze technique is one of the clearest cases of that order of operations.

55% cotton, 45% polyester, made in Japan, in black. The cloth is soft and stretchable, and the dynamic texture and sculptural form come from the compression process rather than from construction.

The stretch means it accommodates rather than fits, and the relief adds visual volume without adding bulk. It contours where it touches and stands slightly away where it does not, which is what makes the silhouette read as sculptural rather than close.

Black and heavily textured, it wants nothing patterned near it. Bare arms and a hard shoe let the surface be the entire event. If you layer it, layer it under something smooth, so the contrast in surface does the work.

The compression is set into the cloth rather than pressed in as a pleat, so it will not wash out. Wash cool and keep it away from high heat all the same, since heat on the synthetic half is what would glaze the texture. Our fabric care guide covers blends and technical cloth.

The Compound Pleats Shirt and the Wooly Pleats Shirt build texture into the cloth by different methods, so the three together show the range of the approach. There is more on the house on the Issey Miyake designer page. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.