Jasper Morrison: Please

Please, a new range of wristwatches designed by Jasper Morrison for the Issey Miyake Watch line produced by Seiko Instruments, is directly inspired by the revolutionary collection of clothing by Issey Miyake. 

With a face and strap in urethane and a case in stainless steel, the distinctive feature of the design is the reference to the pleated fabric invented by Miyake twenty years ago. In the watch this is seen in the three-dimensional strap that continues across the face. To coincide with the arrival in the shops of the watch collection, Jasper Morrison tells Domus how the project began.

Domus: What was the brief for this project? Jasper Morrison: The brief was completely open although a number of earlier projects had been run with a similar structure - a designer coming up with a watch for Issey Miyake. Before me for example, other designers had taken on the same brief, Yves Béhar, Ross Lovegrove, Naoto Fukasawa, Tokujin Yoshioka and Harri Koskinen.

Domus: What was the inspiration behind the concept? Jasper Morrison: I met Issey Miyake on the occasion of an exhibition of photographs taken by Irving Penn over several years of Miyake’s fashion collections. There was one very beautiful photo that caught my eye, of a Pleats Please dress with two-way pleating. I was further inspired by the way Penn managed to capture the essence of Miyake’s design and that gave me the idea to design a watch for Issey Miyake that would encapsulate the spirit of Miyake in the say way. I decided to completely suppress my own signature within the design in order to arrive at something that was as purely Miyake as possible.

Domus: What kind of materials did you use and why? Jasper Morrison: The case is in stainless steel, the face is moulded plastic which is then painted. I had intended it to be extruded aluminium but it wasn’t possible to achieve the required thinness. The strap is a synthetic rubber or stainless steel link for a future model.   Domus: What are the main characteristics? Jasper Morrison: The main one is the effect of the pleated strap which continues across the face of the watch.