Issey Miyake’s clothes have always had an unusual amount of design in their design. Take his Pleats Please line, introduced in 1993, which explored a new clothes-making technique: cutting and folding cloth, then pressing it between layers of rice paper to create hundreds of perfect creases. It seemed that, as if by magic, computer-designed geometric renderings were suddenly made wearable.

Its folded structural aesthetic appealed not only to buyers of clothing but to architects, too. Miyake’s other experiments in cloth patterns have been shown in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and he’s been steadily developing a presence outside the world of fashion.

In 2006, Miyake took his biggest leap yet. He and two collaborators—product designer Naoto Fukasawa and graphic designer Taku Satoh—opened 21_21 Design Sight in a Tokyo building designed by that poet of poured concrete, Tadao Ando. The multifunctional exhibition space and research facility provides a home for people interested in an expanded definition of design. “We always dreamed of a space in Japan,” says Miyake, who promises “new and unprecedented solutions” from his unusual venture.

How unusual is it? Chocolate was the subject and the name of the very first show, featuring 70 paintings, sculptures, video projects, photographs and sound projects about—and inspired by—the celebrated sweet. Sound designer Eric Nagy composed music evoking the transformation of chocolate over time, and Fukasawa, the show’s organizer, produced three lacquered brown objects—a chair, a coat hanger and an electrical outlet—that looked as though they had been cast from chocolate.

The venue’s current show, “xxist-Century Man,” through July 6, was curated by Miyake himself. On display are clothes that he made of paper discarded by the garment industry and a chair that the Japanese design firm Nendo constructed out of an enormous cylinder of tightly rolled waste paper—refuse from the production of a Pleats Please collection. The exhibition offers an open-ended answer to the question posed in the show’s stated premise: “Where are we headed, now that we live in the century once hailed as the future?” If Miyake has anything to say about it, serious questions like that are coming back into fashion.

"Outta Sight: Issey Miyake" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.