PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE Taichung Top City by Keisuke Fujiwara Design Office

Keisuke Fujiwara of Keisuke Fujiwara Design Office designed the renovation of PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE Taichung Top City in Taiwan. For Fujiwara, who has continuously designed stores for the brand, this project was a renovation of a space he himself had originally designed.

When working with the ISSEY MIYAKE team on a new store, Fujiwara explains that the process typically begins with a set of numerical requirements: the total length of racking needed, storage area, number of fitting rooms, and so on. From there, he usually presents three zoning proposals, refining the design in close dialogue with the brand.

Asked about the mirror-polished, delicately proportioned clothes rack that immediately catch the eye in this space, Fujiwara reflects: "With PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE, there's always a freshness to each season, a sense of surprise at what the collection has become. As someone involved in the interior design, I feel I need to carry that same spirit. I approach each project with the intention of dismantling my own design rulebook I've built up and pushing myself toward something new. The overall aim is always an elegant, light-footed space that aligns with the brand's aesthetic, but I also want to attempt something new, even in the smallest detail. For the Taichung Top City store, that new challenge was a clothes rack with V-shaped legs."

To express the sense of lightness that is a constant design brief, Fujiwara designed the legs so that only a single edge of a square tube, cut perpendicular to its length, makes contact with the floor, introducing a minimal tension to the piece. He was equally deliberate in omitting any horizontal stretcher between the legs, keeping the only horizontal element as the bar from which garments hang, another carefully considered decision in pursuit of visual weightlessness.

That commitment to lightness extends to the choice of materials. "For PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE clothes racks, I always use 22x22mm square tube," Fujiwara says. "It's only a 3mm difference, but 25x25mm looks heavy, and that simply won't do." The use of square tube for the hanging bar also serves a functional purpose. With a round tube, a hanger makes contact at only a single point on top, causing garments to shift and fall out of alignment. A square tube, by contrast, contacts the hanger at two upper edges, providing far greater stability.

This meticulous attention to making each element appear as refined as possible is equally evident in the two stools Fujiwara designed for the brand, a pair of which are installed in the Taichung store. The stools are constructed primarily from 12mm and 9mm round tube, with the diagonal bracing that extends upward from the footrest reduced to a mere 6mm in diameter. Fujiwara deliberately avoided having tubes of the same diameter meet at any junction, designing each connection point so that different-sized members come together, a quietly considered detail that speaks to the precision of his approach.

Hearing Fujiwara speak about his exacting sense of proportion and the spatial intentions embedded in these clothes racks brings to mind an earlier design of his, a clothes rack of beautiful, interlocking curves, almost like a Chinese ring puzzle. The pursuit of refined detail and its ongoing evolution at Keisuke Fujiwara Design Office becomes all the more vivid when traced through the arc of his work with PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE.