| dc.description.abstract | In the late 1980s, Miyake Design Studio began to register patents concerning the Studio’s development of novel techniques to process pleated clothing. Their first patent, filed in 1989, was registered in designer Issey Miyake’s name, detailing the use of an industrial machine to pleat an entire garment after sewing, reversing the order of the conventional approach to creating pleated garments. In the years that followed, this entry into what I term “technical discourse” would proliferate with the Studio’s establishing of the PLEATS PLEASE brand specializing in pleated garments, and the A-POC (“a piece of cloth”) project with designer and textile engineer Fujiwara Dai. Each of these projects produced numerous patents, including a period between 1997 and 2008 I call the “Miyake Patent Explosion” when the Studio filed twenty patents with the Japan Patent Office and its international counterparts.
In contrast to aesthetic discourses proposing the value of a work on its artistic merits and intellectual content, technical discourse points to the profusion of texts produced and circulated by the Studio—in this thesis, patents and legal claims—to uphold the utility of their products and their protection as intellectual property. By engaging with technical discourse, Miyake Design Studio were not only creating legal safeguards around the ideas it considered proprietary. Rather, their extensive production of technical discourse positioned Miyake as a figure who exceeded the boundaries of fashion, approaching its adjacent categories of unhyphenated design, architecture, and art within whose circles his objects circulate as currency.
Exploring these texts as they are deployed in the defense of intellectual property, I argue that technical discourse can be treated as a form of historical archive that allows us to historicize claims to technological inheritance that bear upon the discussion of Miyake’s work. Specifically, I look to patents as a citational practice, or as Alain Pottage and Brad Sherman write, a “chain of reference” through which patent lawyers and engineers make deliberate connections between one technology and another to acknowledge, distinguish, and legitimize. Examining three episodes where technical discourse opens the way for historical narrative—a lawsuit over imitation goods, a case of mistaken identity in design criticism, and a moment of technological dissolution—I argue that we cannot divorce Miyake and his work from the technical complex that surrounds the Studio’s production of objects. Turning to these technical discourses that exist in the public record, I suspend the promise of monographic history that peers into the mind of the individual and probe instead the possibilities of seeing agencies beyond those attributed to the authorial figure of Miyake— his corporate apparatus, his allies, his admirers, his critics, his opponents, the receptive public. | |
