8 Strangely Fascinating Fashion Designers

While the traditional ancient methods of making fashion are held in high regard, there are artists and designers who are breaking the mold. If it's heavy-hitting ready-to-wear innovators Herpen, Watanabe, Yamamoto, and Miyake, or another world of designers who haven't been academically or directly trained in the art of fashion but are leveraging their engineering and science skills and mixing it with fashion.

Posted On April 26th, 2021

Iris Van Herpen

Iris Van Herpen is a visionary thinker known for fusing science with emerging technologies in her apparel designs. She creates each set of highly professional craftsmanship that combines long-lost (nearly forgotten) and cutting-edge production techniques. Her contemporary perspective is reflected in her creative expression, which reflects on the concepts of perfection and rebirth and expresses them through wearable art.

Yohji Yamamoto

Yamamoto, a visionary of creative expression, creates clothes in ways that act as more than just garments and are legitimate works of art. His style is typically expressed by extremely professional fabric manipulations in oversized silhouettes with a neutral color scheme. The design's muse is envisioned as an outsider who refuses to adapt and has a very different point of view.

Junya Watanbe

Junya Watanabe is a revolutionary-driven Japanese artist who trained under the legendary Rei Kawakubo, the owner and head designer of Comme des Garçons. Though Watanabe continues to design for Comme des Garçons' menswear and womenswear lines, he also produces his own line. Every season, the techno couture collections imagined are vastly different, providing depth of artistic expression and vision.

Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman is an architect, author, and professor at the MIT Media Lab and the Mediated Matter Group who studies computational modeling and digital manufacturing of scientific materials. Her goal is to link man-made and natural ecosystems. The aim and precise fire against the creation of dimensional parts are to catch entrenched living matter inside something wearable.

Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake's fashion house, which debuted in the 1970s, made use of the innovative creation of emerging technology. His architectural principles are constantly challenging the traditional, and he aims to demonstrate the relation between the body and the clothing. He is also known for his avant-garde modernization, which combines emerging technology with ancient and conventional techniques.

Nick Cave

Nick Cave is a sculptural designer, professor of the Fashion Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, and dancer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in New York. His most well-known groundbreaking performance ensembles are the "Soundsuits," which are worn as a means of cultural security. The parts are seen as a medium for transformation, instilling control on getting people together, changing body image, and studying surrender to otherness.

Ying Gao

Ying Gao, a fashion designer, and university lecturer has had over 50 shows in Switzerland and Canada. She has earned praise in over 300 press publications spanning from Vogue to TIME for her work fusing urban and media design with architecture. Her designs include medial quality latex or glass as textiles which take place in a combination of transformative social and urban contexts. Regardless of the mission, Ying experiments with fashion technologies in novel ways that go beyond textiles.

Chisato Tsumari

Tsumori Chisato was born in Japan's Saitama prefecture. Chisato studied fashion at Tokyo's Bunka Fashion College. In 1977, she started working with Issey Miyake under the "Issey Sports" line, later called "I.S. Chisato Tsumori Designs." In 1990, she launched her own line with the help of Issey Miyake. Tsumori Chisato has a colossal fan base purely because of her beautiful prints. The majority are hand-drawn and inspired by Japanese culture and comics, modern art, felines, and various other references.