For most designers fashion's Holy Grail is to transform

For most designers fashion's Holy Grail is to transform, twice-yearly, the way we dress.

Others aim higher, dreaming instead of changing the world, or at least its appearance, in a more far-reaching way. For 40 years now, Issey Miyake has aspired to just that. First came Pleats Please. "For me, it's a very powerful idea to actually change the meaning of something," he once told me. "Like the Walkman, for example. You know, it completely changed the idea of sound, and that's great. My dream, and the reason I first decided to open my studio, was that I thought to myself, 'If I could one day make clothes like T-shirts and jeans, I would be very excited.'

"But the more I worked, the more I felt very far away from doing so," he continued. "I was always doing such heavy things, far away from the people. 'Are you stupid?' I said to myself. 'Don't you remember why you started designing in the first place?' And then I thought, 'Okay, Pleats Please.' So I began to think how to make it, how to wash it, how to co-ordinate it, even how to pack it. And I worked on how to keep the price down."

With this in mind, a little over a decade later Miyake, in collaboration with Dai Fujiwara, came up with the equally innovative A-POC (A Piece of Cloth), taking an unusually democratic mindset further still.