Issey Miyake Wooly Pleats Shirt

Run pleats horizontally and vertically through the same piece of cloth and it stops folding and starts crimping. The surface gathers into small irregular cells, and the hand that results is soft and slightly springy, closer to a crepe or a light wool than to anything you would expect from polyester. That is where the name comes from: not the fibre, which is synthetic, but the behaviour, which is woolly. In white and semi-sheer the effect is at its most legible, since the crimping produces its own faint shadow pattern across the cloth. A cap sleeve keeps the whole thing minimal and lets the texture be the only thing happening.

Getting a woolly hand out of polyester by geometry alone, with no fibre trickery, is a genuinely clever piece of work, and the garment is light and easy in a way wool would not be.

Making a material behave like a different material is a recurring Issey Miyake move, and cross-pleating is one of the most direct versions of it.

100% polyester, made in Japan, in white. Semi-sheer, with both horizontal and vertical pleats and a cap sleeve.

Cross-pleated cloth compresses a great deal, so the garment opens out considerably in wearing. Size it as a shape rather than a measurement. Semi-sheer, particularly in white.

The crimped surface has enough going on that a plain bottom half is the right answer. Under a jacket, the cap sleeve and the texture both stay visible, which not every top manages.

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 Wooly Pleats Cardigan is the same technique in recycled polyester at cardigan length. The Compound Pleats Shirt is another multi-directional pleat. Everything we carry from Issey Miyake is listed together.