Why Issey Miyake Was Steve Jobs’s Favorite Designer - The New York Times

The real beginning of the fashion-technology love affair and its legacy lies with Issey Miyake, who died last week.

Little wonder, really, that Issey Miyake was Steve Jobs’s favorite designer.

Jobs’s personal uniform of black mock turtlenecks, who died on Aug.

But it was his understanding and appreciation of technology and how it could be harnessed to an aesthetic point of view to create new, seductive utilities that set Mr.

So it went: Next came an experiment involving a continuous piece of thread fed into an industrial knitting machine to create one piece of cloth with inbuilt seams that traced different garment shapes — which could in turn be cut out as desired by the wearer, thus eliminating manufacturing detritus.

This is where the black turtleneck comes in.

Miyake came through technology.

Miyake to make a similar style for Apple’s employees — though when he returned to Cupertino with the idea, he was “booed off the stage,” he told Mr.

Miyake, ultimately adopting a Miyake garment — the black mock turtleneck — as a key part of his own uniform.

(Mr. Isaacson wrote he saw them stacked in Mr. Jobs’s closet, and the book’s cover features a portrait of Mr. Jobs wearing, natch, a black mock turtleneck.).

Jobs’s particular blend of genius and his focus: the way he settled on a uniform to reduce the number of decisions he had to make in the mornings, the better to focus on his work.

Also his ability to blend soft-corner elegance and utility in not just his own style but the style of his products.

As Ryan Tate wrote in Gawker, the turtleneck “helped make him the world’s most recognizable C.E.O.” Troy Patterson of Bloomberg called it “the vestment of a secular monk.” It was so embedded in pop culture that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos later adopted it when she was trying to convince the world of her own Jobs-like brilliance, even though Mr.

Miyake’s brand retired the style in 2011, after Mr.

Miyake, after all, the black turtleneck was largely the province of beatniks and Samuel Beckett, associated with clove cigarettes, downtown and poetry readings (also ninjas, cat burglars and anyone who wanted to blend into the night).