Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., November 9, 2019–October 15, 2020. Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty (exhibition catalogue). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2015. Tuite, Rebecca C. 1950s in Vogue: the Jessica Daves Years, 1952-1962. London: Thames and Hudson, 2019.

Part of the autumn-winter 1980 collection, Plastic Body (above) was the first work in Miyake’s Body series—a five-year effort to leverage various traditional and modern technologies to turn clothing into a sculptural medium. Made of molded fiber-reinforced plastic, Plastic Body is mass-manufacturable, a standardized, reproducible, synthetic skin to be worn over the wearer’s own. In the book Issey Miyake: Bodyworks (Shogakukan, 1983), writer Shozo Tsurumoto conveys the conceptual importance of skin in Miyake’s designs through two photographs of naked female torsos: one of a young woman and the other of an aging one. “The seamless and taut skin surface of the young body contrasts with the wrinkled and textured surface of the aged,” writes Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada. “Skin is portrayed as a two-dimensional plane that records the process of aging, imprinting the creases made by the force of time.” — A.R.Penn, Irving. Irving Penn: Cranium Architecture (exhibition catalogue). New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1988. Models dance in 2019 as they present ready-to-wear creations by Mr. Miyake. Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Kazanjian, Dodie. “What was it Like to be Young and Creative in the 1940s?” Vogue 181 (March 1991): 382–83, 430. Penn photographed for Vogue and commercial clients in America and abroad for nearly 70 years. Whether an innovative fashion image, striking portrait, or compelling still life, each of Penn’s pictures bears his trademark style of elegant aesthetic simplicity. Imrie, Tim. "Irving Penn at the V & A." British Journal of Photography 134 (Febrary 13, 1987): 190–91. Penn was also a superb portraitist. His so-called "corner portraits" put celebrities into tight corners in awkward poses that revealed unfamiliar elements of their personalities to the camera.Beauty and Style, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, December 11, 2021–March 13, 2022. Irving Penn: (opens in a new window) Masterpieces by Irving Penn, Les Franciscaines, Deauville, France, March 4–May 28, 2023. Eisler, Colin. "Out of Vogue: Penn and Avedon's Salon De Refuse." Art International 22 (February 1979): 35–37. I was living in the town of Fuchu, adjacent to Hiroshima. My house, where my mother was, was 2.3 kilometers away from the epicenter of the bomb blast. Miyake’s career has been marked by a number of partnerships with creative legends in their own right— like Irving Penn, Ikko Tanaka, Shiro Kuramata, and Ron Arad—and more recently with design brands Artemide and Iittala. “Designing clothes isn’t solitary work, it requires associations with many people,” Miyake was quoted as saying in the book Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake (Bulfinch Press, 1999). “I want people to know everything is the result of teamwork—like making a movie.”

The recent vogue for electric lamps in the style of the old standing lanterns comes, I think, from a new awareness of the softness and warmth of paper, qualities that, for a time, we had forgotten,” novelist Junichiro Tanizaki noted in his seminal 1933 essay, “In Praise of Shadows.” Tanizaki famously compared the traditional Japanese attitude toward light and shade with modern Westernized ideas in the essay—the differences he noted remain to this day. I seem to be present at occasions of great social change,” he was quoted as saying in the 2017 book “Where Did Issey Come From?” by Kazuko Koike. “Paris in May ’68, Beijing at Tiananmen, New York on 9/11. Like a witness to history.” Drawing on Tanizaki’s emphasis on the subtlety of light and shadow in the Japanese home, Miyake embarked on a collaboration with the Italian product design company Artemide. Together they produced IN-EI (‘shadow’ in Japanese), a series of folded lampshades that, when opened, create twisting geometric sculptures. Like the ‘132 5’ dress (above), the lampshades strike a distinctive balance between mathematical precision and organic forms. The example in the V&A collection is named Katatsumuri, the Japanese word for snail.Irving Penn: Vintage Prints from the Series "Earthly Bodies," 1949–1950, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, December 6 –January 19, 1991. Irving Penn, Other Ways of Being: 100 Photographs, 1948-1971, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, March 30–April 28, 1990. Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals—Images 1947–1975, Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY, September 9–October 11, 1977. Traveled to: Salt Lark Art Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 2–December 2, 1979; Marlborough Gallery, London, May 20–June 20, 1981.

Liberman, Alexander. The Art and Technique of Color Photography: A Treasury of Color Photographs by the Staff Photographers of Vogue, House & Garden, Glamour. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951. Hopkinson, Tom. "Great Photographers of the World, 1: Irving Penn." The Daily Telegraph Magazine no.287 (April 17, 1970): 34–44. Penn, Irving. Close Encounters: Irving Penn: Portraits of Artists and Writers (exhibition catalogue). New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2008. Bunker, George R., ed. Alexey Brodovitch and His Influence. Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Art. 1972.

Irving Penn: Collection Privée/Privatsammlung (Irving Penn: Private Collection), Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, Switzerland, June 22–August 28, 1993. I developed periostitis due to radiation exposure when I was a fourth-grader at primary school. Some people died of this disease, but I was saved by penicillin. My mother nursed me while I was fighting the disease and died soon after my condition improved. During the 1970s, Miyake identified Kuramata as an important new talent and asked him to design the Issey Miyake shop in the From–1st Building in Tokyo in 1976. Kuramata proposed laying garments out on flat surfaces and designed a table made of aluminum honeycomb sheet with a timber surface that cantilevered out of the wall and appeared to be floating with no visible means of support. His shop for Bergdorf Goodman used terrazzo extensively, while the Paris shop used walls draped with fabric. Over a decade and a half, Kuramata designed more than 100 interiors for Miyake. Wollheim, Peter. "Irving Penn and the Metapsychology of Beauty." Photo Communique 3 (Summer 1981): 8–19.