A-POC ABLE Issey Miyake turns Tomokazu Matsuyama art into wearable textiles
A-POC ABLE's TYPE-XII turns Tomokazu Matsuyama's paintings into 14 engineered pieces, with Kyoto-printed cloth and body-shifting triangular patterns.
A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE has pushed Tomokazu Matsuyama’s visual language into a 14-piece TYPE-XII capsule, with seven coats and seven T-shirts that began launching in Japan on July 1 and will reach New York, Paris, London and Milan on July 8. The pieces do not treat Matsuyama’s work like surface decoration; they turn his imagery into clothing that behaves like a piece of constructed textile.
That distinction matters. The project starts at the fabric stage, not the pattern stage, which is where A-POC has always separated itself from ordinary fashion collaboration. A-POC, announced in 1998 as “A Piece Of Cloth,” evolved into A-POC ABLE under Yoshiyuki Miyamae with a mandate to keep testing how clothes are made. In TYPE-XII, the brand says the garments use Kyoto-printed base textiles and a special triangular pattern technique that shifts in three dimensions as the body moves, giving the surface a sense of motion before the wearer even steps forward.
Matsuyama is a New York-based contemporary artist born in 1976 in Gifu, Japan, whose practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. His first large-scale solo exhibition in Tokyo, Tomokazu Matsuyama: FIRST LAST, ran from March 8 to May 11, 2025 at Azabudai Hills Gallery and included about 40 works, among them 15 large-scale pieces premiering in Japan. A-POC ABLE first linked the collaboration to that show with three coats and a limited run of 33 T-shirts built around Matsuyama’s Cluster 2020 series. TYPE-XII scales the idea up without losing the small-batch feel that makes these projects feel collectible from the outset.
The bigger test comes next at ISSEY MIYAKE / NEW YORK, which will host a special exhibition from July 9 to August 31, 2026 in the store and its MADO gallery. Alongside the garments, the presentation will include Matsuyama’s equestrian sculptures made with the same original 3D-printing technology used for A-POC ABLE mannequins, plus related paintings and an immersive hanging textile installation. That mix of garment, object and installation is exactly where the project lands strongest: not as art merch with a luxury label, but as a serious experiment in how limited-edition fashion can be engineered from the cloth up.
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