Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto Autumn/Winter 1991

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren opened their boutique at 430 King's Road in 1971 as "Let It Rock", selling 1950s Teddy Boy clothing and rock 'n' roll records. A year later, Westwood's interests shifted toward biker culture, zips, and leather, and the shop was rebranded "Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die", complete with a skull and crossbones. After the pair were prosecuted under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for their increasingly provocative printed T-shirts, they doubled down rather than backing off, relaunching the shop in 1974 as "SEX", which became inseparable from the rise of the Sex Pistols and the birth of British punk. By December 1976, as the punk movement hardened politically, the shop transformed again into "Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes", its interior redone to resemble the bombed-out ruins of Dresden. After the Sex Pistols collapsed and punk went mainstream, McLaren and Westwood ended both their romantic and business partnership; the shop reopened in 1979/1980 under its final name, "World's End", borrowed from the historic nickname for that specific stretch of Chelsea near the river (local buses used to display "World's End" as their destination), and it still stands at that address today, complete with a clock that runs backwards.

A pleat is a fold pressed into fabric, but Issey Miyake flipped the usual process on its head. Normally, fabric is pleated first and then cut and sewn into a garment. Miyake did the reverse: garments were cut and sewn first, at roughly three times their finished size, then sandwiched between sheets of paper and heat-pressed into permanent pleats. Because the fabric was polyester, a material that can be reshaped at high temperatures, the pleats held their form permanently, through washing, scrunching, and packing, without ever needing an iron.

Miyake's fascination with pleats began in 1988 after an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, inspired by a folded polyester-silk scarf. Working with textile designer Makiko Minagawa, he refined the technique for years, testing early prototypes on dancers in William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet Company in 1991. Pleats Please launched as its own line in 1993, unveiled during the finale of Miyake's Spring/Summer 1994 Paris show, and became one of the most enduring things he ever created: lightweight, machine-washable, and designed to adapt to any body rather than one fixed size. Decades later, it remains a cult favorite, even seeing a resurgence among Gen Z shoppers on resale platforms like Depop.