Issey Miyake’s Satoshi Kondo is behind the costumes for Némo Flouret’s newest ballet

The thought of motion has been on the beating coronary heart of Issey Miyake because the eponymous designer started the home in Tokyo in 1970. His signature pleating method would come to encapsulate this sense of dynamism: capable of be folded solely flat, on the physique the plissé clothes got here to life, creating vivid silhouettes that reworked with motion, from bouncing ‘alien craft’ constructed into attire to advanced origami folds and twists. ‘The physique, the material masking it and a cushty relationship between the 2,’ is how the late designer, who handed away in 2022, described the nexus of his life’s work.

It’s a design philosophy which has been embraced by Satoshi Kondo, the designer behind Issey Miyake’s womenswear line, in his acclaimed collections for the Japanese home since his tenure started in 2019. Certainly, his debut assortment as inventive director, for S/S 2020, noticed fashions twist, twirl and leap throughout the runway in an expression of uninhibited pleasure that has lengthy outlined the Issey Miyake model. ‘I needed to precise the enjoyment of carrying garments, and the enjoyment of motion,’ he mentioned on the time, and his ensuing runway reveals have usually featured moments of latest dance or efficiency artwork.

In 2025, Kondo launched into a brand new mission, collaborating with French dancer and choreographer Némo Flouret on the costumes for his new up to date ballet, Derniers Feux (Final Mild). It isn’t the primary time Kondo and Flouret have collaborated; for Issey Miyake’s S/S 2024 and A/W 2025 womenswear reveals, Flouret created a collection of ‘dynamic performances’ which unfolded on the runway, ‘capturing the spirit of every assortment’s theme,’ because the model describes.

Derniers Feux, which premiered on the 79th Pageant d’Avignon final summer time and is now touring internationally, together with performances at Paris’ Grand Palais in June, marks the pair’s most intensive collaboration but. Kondo, who says he’s drawn to the ‘in-depth engagement with the human physique’ and ‘rigorous physicality’ of Flouret’s work, created a collection of vibrant costumes which draw on the vivid use of color and technical development that outline his collections at Issey Miyake. Certainly, regardless of the collaboration being beneath Kondo’s title, a number of of the clothes and materials are harking back to these utilized in latest womenswear collections for the model.

These embody vibrant knitted sweaters with round ‘peep holes’ and trousers with further hanging ‘legs’, whereas different items are used as a part of the present’s set. ‘The sheer vibrancy I felt in Derniers Feux – the choreography, the scenography, the fireworks, and naturally the performers themselves – was the supply of my inspiration,’ says Kondo. ‘In designing and making the costumes, my hope was to create one thing that intimately enhances, if not elevates, the expertise of Derniers Feux.’

Flouret describes Derniers Feux as ‘a reverie on the ephemeral and the immaterial’, which is loosely themed across the concept of dancers making a present – ‘a nascent utopia carried by ten performers making an attempt to present form collectively to a world after the world’. Happening largely on a scaffold construction, the extremely bodily work builds as much as a pyrotechnical firework show, a climax of delayed gratification which is teased all through the efficiency.

‘I needed to work with fireworks, the photographs they convey, and the stress surrounding them: the concern of hazard, the emotion and pleasure they evoke, that fleeting second of eternity, that ephemerality,’ mentioned Flouret on the work’s premiere final 12 months. ‘The ten performers dance, play music, and assemble and dismantle the set. They’re all technicians, performers, and spectators. They’re continuously in movement. Dance is so central that we nearly neglect it: it’s a lifestyle, the glue that binds collectively the photographs that seem and disappear.’