Déjà vu from designer of Jobs’ trademark shirt
Of the many technological and artistic triumphs of the fashion designer Issey Miyake, his most famous piece of work will end up being the black mock turtleneck indelibly associated with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
The model was retired from production in 2011, after Jobs’s death, but later this month, Issey Miyake Inc. — the innovative craftsman’s eponymous clothing brand — is releasing a $270 garment called the Semi-Dull T.
It’s 60 percent polyester, 40 percent cotton, and guaranteed to inspire déjà vu.
Don’t call it a comeback. The company is at pains to state that the turtle- neck, designed by Miyake protégé Yusuke Takahashi with a trimmer silhouette and higher shoulders than the original, isn’t a reissue. And even if the garment were a straight-up imitation, its importance as a cultural artifact is more about the inimitable way Jobs wore it.
For Jobs, this way of dressing was a kind of consolation prize after employees at Apple resisted his attempts to create a company uniform.
In the early 1980s, he’d visited Tokyo to tour the headquarters of Sony, which had 30,000 employees in Japan. And all of them — from co-founder Akio Morita to each factory worker, sales rep and secretary — wore the same thing: a traditional blue-and- white work jacket.
In the telling of Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Morita explained to Jobs that Sony had imposed a uniform since its founding in 1946.
In 1981, for Sony’s 35th anniversary, Morita had commissioned Miyake to design a jacket.
Miyake returned with a futuristic taupe nylon model with no lapels and sleeves that unzipped to convert it into a vest.
Jobs loved it and commissioned Miyake to design a vest for Apple, which he then unsuccessfully pitched to a crowd in Cupertino, Calif. “Oh, man, did I get booed off the stage,” Jobs told Isaacson.