The Hiroshima survivor who made Steve Jobs’ turtleneck

Issey Miyake was a lifelong enemy of frippery. The Japanese fashion designer favored simple forms: Many of his clothes consisted largely of a single piece of draped or folded cloth. But his use of materials was blazingly original. He used a heat press to turn polyester—once considered too gauche for high fashion—into masses of pleats, like an accordion. One 1982 design featured a bodice woven with paper, rattan, and bamboo. “Material for clothing is limitless,” he said in 2001. “Anything can make clothing.”

Born in Hiroshima, Miyake was just 7 when “he saw the flash of the atomic bomb” that wiped out the city, said The Guardian (U.K.). His mother soon died of radiation poisoning, and he developed a bone disease that left him with a limp. After studying graphic design in Tokyo, Miyake went to Paris in the 1960s to intern with Givenchy. When “another bout of radiation-related disease” forced his return to Tokyo in 1970, he borrowed money from friends to launch his own fashion studio, and his designs quickly became an international sensation. In the 1980s, Apple founder Steve Jobs selected Miyake’s black mock turtleneck as his own signature look. “I asked Issey to make me some,” Jobs once said, “and he made me like a hundred.”

By the late ’90s, Miyake had delegated most day-to-day designing, said CNN.com. “But he never stopped innovating,” and he was particularly interested in developing environmentally sustainable materials. Miyake would remain “faithful to the craft of the couturier” to the end. “Technology is valuable,” he said in 2016, “but we can never lose sight of the power of the touch of human hands.”