THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Issey took me under his wing.  He made me the lead, almost the host, of this radical runway show he organized in 1976 where there were twelve black models wearing his daring new clothes. I would sing and have multiple roles within what was a fashion show remade as a happening.  The show was a fantastic, subversive idea, still ahead of its time.  Twelve black models from South America, New York, Africa, Paris, on a monthlong tour of Japan in theaters – fifteen thousand people came to see it.  The show was called Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Girls.

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Issey is the only real artist in fashion – smart, sensitive, very humble.  Somewhere between a poet and engineer, philosopher and architect, refining centuries of tradition, but alway in the future, and somewhere in space, the space he borrowed from the idea of the kimonno, and how between the body and the kimono there is only an approximate contact.

Jones/Memoirs, 2015