Homme Plissé Issey Miyake reimagines Matisse’s ‘The Snail’ at Tate Trendy

Henri Matisse made The Snail in Good in 1953, the 12 months earlier than he died, from his mattress. Unable by then to face at a canvas, he had assistants paint sheets of paper in gouache, reduce or tore shapes from them himself, and directed the place every bit needs to be pinned to the wall, repositioning them till he was happy and solely then having them pasted down. The completed work is shut to 3 metres sq., its shapes organized in a unfastened spiral that evokes the ‘unrolling’ he had observed whereas drawing a snail.

When the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake design crew stood in entrance of it at Tate Trendy final 12 months, its measurement shocked them. ‘There’s a vibrancy to it, as if all of the items are nonetheless transferring,’ they inform Wallpaper* now (the model runs and not using a formal head designer). ’They’re so dynamic, so mild, as if they’re prepared to interrupt out from the body.’ The thought for the second version of Open Studio emerged: at this scale, why not flip every cut-out right into a garment?

Open Studio started in 2025, when Homme Plissé stepped off the Paris present calendar to current in locations the model had by no means been, opening its method of working to view as an artist opens a studio. The primary version, at Villa Medicea della Petraia throughout Pitti Uomo, paired a present with an exhibition of the pleating checks and color research behind it. Across the time the design crew have been contemplating the place Open Studio ought to go subsequent, Tate obtained in contact. The museum has a historical past of working with designers on collections drawn from works it holds, and an version constructed round a single paintings, which the model had by no means tried, suited a format involved with opening up a method of constructing; from the everlasting assortment they selected The Snail.

When requested what values of founder Issey Miyake they introduced into the challenge, the design crew spoke of inventive freedom: ‘He at all times instructed us to belief and observe our personal curiosity,’ they are saying. Matisse described the cut-outs as drawing straight into the color. ‘In case you’re an artist, you’ll be able to reduce no matter you need, in no matter method you need,’ they level out. To fulfill the problem of representing a flat portray with clothes, they started by tracing The Snail; they’d by no means labored with a portray this manner, and had enjoyable doing so, discovering it most rewarding how actually every cut-out got here to life on a physique: ‘We’re not simply speaking the discuss, the portray is actually transferring. We’re actually animating the portray itself.’

That fluidity prolonged to Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, with whom the design crew shared their analysis course of (together with the paperwork Tate had equipped on Matisse’s last years) in order that the set and clothes shaped in lockstep, symbiotically, every informing the opposite because it developed. ‘Set design is rarely an afterthought,’ they preserve. Vanderbroeck, whose background is in theatre, constructed the tank in layers – each literal and philosophical – understanding that the room could be a distinct one by the tip of the night. ‘It can not exist with out the dancers and the dancers can not exist with out the set.’

The ground of the south tank was coated in white felt, reduce into flat shapes and laid flush, with the clothes beneath it. Dancers from Dresden Frankfurt Dance Firm lifted the shapes away separately between classes of One One One, Ioannis Mandafounis’s improvised type by which a dancer continues for so long as a single spectator maintains eye contact; by the tip they’d uncovered the entire of The Snail on the centre of the room, each one among Matisse’s shapes made up of a pleated garment laid flat, earlier than turning into the capsule to complete.

In Matisse’s studio, the shapes had been pinned the place he pointed, and moved when he modified his thoughts; the completed work retains one thing of that provisional state in its torn edges and overlapping corners, the motion an echo of items that after moved. Circulating once more as clothes, on our bodies, throughout a flooring, the cut-outs had for one night a freedom they misplaced after they have been pasted down, ‘It’s beginning flat, it’s being worn, after which it’s being left behind,’ Vanderbroeck says.

Homme Plissé has labored with an artist’s hand earlier than Open Studio existed: its A/W 2024 assortment, proven on the Paris runway, was made with Ronan Bouroullec, whose felt-tip drawings have been printed throughout the garments, with printed clothes hung alongside the partitions of Palais de Tokyo because the backdrop. The home referred to as it a inventive session. The place Bouroullec’s drawings have been utilized to the clothes, the clothes at Tate Trendy have been themselves assembled into the paintings, in order that laid flat on the ground of the tank they have been the collage, and worn they have been the collage in movement.

The capsule, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate, runs to a printed cardigan, tunic and T-shirt seeing the composition’s blocks of orange, lilac, cobalt and inexperienced on white pleated jersey; a long-sleeved high within the collage’s palette; a crossbody bag; and a diamond-shaped scarf. Between the primary go to and the ground of the tank, the concept itself barely modified, and that, greater than something made alongside the best way, is what the design crew discover progressive. ‘That pure concept was carried from the drafting board to the ultimate realisation,’ they are saying. ‘To us, that’s one thing new.’