Issey Miyake: Japanese fashion designer dies aged 84

Revolutionary Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake has died, aged 84, his company has announced.

Known for his innovative styles and perfume, Miyake built a global fashion brand, which included designing Steve Jobs’ iconic turtle neck jumpers.

He was known to experiment with traditional and modern techniques during his career of more than 50 years.

Miyake died of liver cancer on Friday, and a private funeral has already taken place, Japanese media is reporting.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake was just seven years old when the city was devastated by an atomic bomb dropped by the United States.

He was reluctant to talk about it as an adult, and wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that he did not want to be known as “the designer who survived the atomic bomb”.

In the 1960s he moved to Paris where he worked with lauded fashion designers Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy.

He moved to New York for a short time, before heading back to Tokyo in 1970 to open the Miyake Design Studio.

By the 1980s he was celebrated as one of the world’s most pioneering designers as he worked with materials from plastic to metal – and also traditional Japanese materials and paper.