Apple And Issey Miyake Unite For The iPhone Pocket –“It’s A Moment Of Connecting The Dots”
It’s no secret that Steve Jobs’s favourite fashion designer was Issey Miyake. The former Apple CEO adopted the Japanese designer’s minimal black turtlenecks as part of the iconic uniform he wore on Keynote stages around the world, though apart from a mutual respect – and the facts that Miyake once appeared in Apple’s Think Different campaign and almost designed an Apple uniform – the duo never officially collaborated.
Until now. This month, Apple releases a collaboration with Issey Miyake, marking the tech brand’s first union with a fashion house since the Apple Watch Hermès in 2015. The product? A curious-looking rectangle of 3D-knitted fabric known as the iPhone Pocket. Robust and cushioned, with stretchy pleats true to Issey Miyake’s iconic Pleats Please design, the accessory is designed to snugly hold any model of iPhone (as well as small essentials like AirPods or a chapstick).
The iPhone Pocket comes in two lengths – one short enough to carry on the wrist and another that can be worn cross-body – as well as a spectrum of colours: three for the long design and eight for the short, that spans punchy brights like mandarin orange and peacock blue to subtler neutrals. The shorter version can also be tied up and used as a bag charm. Labubu who?
Wear it over your wrist or as a bag charm.
Photographed by Anh Nguyen
Photographed by Anh Nguyen
Like Issey Miyake and Apple’s greatest designs before it, the Pocket is deceptively simple. “At first glance, you probably wouldn’t recognise what it is,” says Yoshiyuki Miyamae, design director of the Miyake Design Studio (Issey Miayke’s parent company). A longtime staffer who joined the company in 2001 and worked closely alongside Miyake himself, Miyamae is in charge of A-POC ABLE, the label based on the late designer’s A Piece of Cloth concept, which examines the minutiae of clothes making. That fastidiousness and technical knowledge made him the perfect man for the job.
To bring the collaboration to fruition, Miyamae handpicked a talented trio of designers from across Issey Miyake to form a team, and they set about making prototypes. Some were crafted from paper, origami-style. They took their ideas to Apple’s HQ in Cupertino where they met with the industrial design team, and from there sparked a creative process that Miyamae likens to making music. “It was like a jazz session. Everyone brainstormed and asked, ‘how can we develop it further?’, ‘should we take it in this direction or that?’,” he says. “There was a mutual respect and understanding that made the process really efficient and productive.”
Photographed by Anh Nguyen
