A-POC ABLE Issey Miyake's biggest Japan store opens in Aoyama, with a Tokujin Yoshioka interior and its own gallery
Japan's own design house has built its biggest showcase yet for a line built on off-the-rack, size-free clothing — three Tokujin Yoshioka-designed floors and a dedicated gallery, a month after Issey Miyake reopened its flagship a few blocks away.
Issey Miyake's contemporary label A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE opened its largest store in Japan on September 4, according to the company: a three-floor flagship in Tokyo's Minami-Aoyama, its interior designed by Tokujin Yoshioka.
The new store, A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE / AOYAMA, sits at the FROM-1st Building on Aoyama-dori, expanding the label's presence there to three full sales floors, which the company calls its largest A-POC ABLE location in the country.
Yoshioka and his studio TYD built the interior around a single installation: pre-woven, garment-shaped components strung through the space, a nod to A-POC's own manufacturing method of producing a finished piece of clothing from a single length of fabric rather than cutting and sewing separate panels together.
The store also opens with a dedicated gallery, A-POC SPACE, which the company describes as a venue for exhibitions and collaborations across design disciplines. Its opening show, "PORTRAITS: HANDS" by the Paris-based photographer Kenta Umemoto, runs from September 4 to October 28.
The investment lands barely a month after Issey Miyake reopened its flagship "132 5." store a few streets away in early August, and together the two point to a homegrown design house doubling down on Minami-Aoyama even as global maisons crowd the same strip. Adding a standalone gallery is a Presentation bet as much as a retail one: floor space that sells nothing directly but gives the brand a reason for press, artists and repeat visits between collection changes. Whether A-POC SPACE draws its own return footfall, rather than riding the flagship's opening buzz, is the more interesting test over the coming year.