CARRY THE DRAMA

Even though retail spaces have become one of architecture’s more reliable playgrounds — from OMA’s experiments with Prada to Peter Marino’s art-infused LVMH boutiques — designing a store for Issey Miyake is a more challenging prospect than most. The clothes themselves are less like garments and more like creators of space, as Pierre Alexandre de Looz put it in his introduction to an interview with Miyake-san in PIN–UP. Miyake himself said the space created between the clothes and the body is what interested him the most.

When Miyake opened his Tribeca flagship in 2001, he handed the project to his late friend Frank Gehry, who was at the height of his post-Bilbao notoriety and whose answer to an empty cast-iron warehouse was a titanium tornado — a vortex rising from the cellar floor and swirling upward through the street-level ceiling, fabricated from hand- and machine-formed panels on a branching structural system. Miyake had told Domus he wanted someone whose vision could capture and project the organic qualities of nature into a space, and Gehry delivered something that met the clothes at their own level of commitment: exacting, kinetic, and formally radical. It lasted 25 years — a small eternity in retail.

That store was what Jing Liu of SO–IL walked into when the brand commissioned a new flagship at 45 Madison Avenue, in the landmarked New York Life Building. Liu and her co-founder Florian Idenburg first met at SANAA in Tokyo, in the studio of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, which explains their exacting rigor and material finesse. Where Gehry’s store was coolly operatic, SO–IL is all theatrical precision. “Issey Miyake’s focus on design with unique materials and innovative technology has always been forward-looking and universal,” Liu says. “Our approach at SO–IL is similar — forward-looking, optimistic, international, and precise, with a sense of curiosity and openness that’s inherent to New York.”

The centerpiece of the new store is a staircase built from structural glass — the material is doing the holding, which means the concrete treads above appear to hover in the air. Liu calls it a “suspension of disbelief.” Everywhere else, SO–IL’s interventions are pulled tight: new aluminum and steel surfaces calibrated to sit alongside the Neo-Gothic bones of Cass Gilbert’s building — arched windows, steel-studded columns, high ceilings, all deliberately exposed. “We made all new elements as tight, precise, functional, and as invisible as possible so that the old and the new could co-exist in equal parts,” Liu explains. “I feel it’s a joy to see time in architecture.”

At the rear of the store, a gallery called MADO — Japanese for “window” — will rotate exhibitions and collaborations throughout the year, the first such space inside an ISSEY MIYAKE store outside Japan. SO–IL will open it in the fall with a show drawn from their own history of material experimentation. “Issey Miyake has always looked beyond fashion,” Liu says. “At SO–IL, we frequently work with artists of different mediums and always find joy in these collaborations.”

There’s a material circularity running through the whole project. Glass panels from the downstairs space at the Tribeca store are now display tables inside the new one. A titanium panel from the Gehry interior hangs in the space, part sculpture, part commemorative plaque. “The materials we saved and repurposed are not at a meaningful scale,” Liu says, “but I hope they show potential.” The most meaningful gesture is longevity itself: the Gehry store lasted a quarter century, and SO–IL designed this one to do at least the same.

Writing about Gehry, Miyake said the architect “not only understood my sense of fun and adventure but also reciprocated it, and translated that feeling into his work. Architects always have a feel for time, the generation they live in, as we do, and they are always striving toward boundless adventure.” Walking through the new design, one senses that the real work here is not to match Gehry’s gesture, but to refuse to compete with it — allowing the clothes themselves, rather than the architecture that surrounds them, to carry the drama. Liu wanted the airiness and volume of the space to do the elevating, to give the clothes room to expand. “The abundance of daylight brings their color to life,” she says. The space SO–IL made steps back and lets the clothes do what they’ve always done: claim the room.