In Issey Miyake SS25 collection, Maiko Takeda’s dried flower jewelry was a source of wonder.

By Sandrine Merle.

For his latest Issey Miyake SS25 collection, artistic director Satoshi Kondo showed models wearing their hair up or hidden behind jewellery made from real dried flowers. A bouquet of hydrangeas and ferns was positioned over the eyes. A freesia mask with climbing stems covered the face. Working with light and shadow, the visible and the invisible… Masks, glasses and jewellery all in one, the girls and boys looked like elves from a children’s story.

The art of wasi

The jewelry was inspired by the collection’s theme, ‘The Beauty of Paper’, the art of Japanese washi paper. A traditional textured paper, extremely strong, made from long pieces of bark (including mulberry bark), widely used in Japan for decoration, clothing and books. The latter was the starting point for designer Maiko Takena: she picked the plants herself in the wild, then dried them between the pages before assembling them. A very popular pastime in Japan…

Blurring the lines

Maiko Takena trained in jewellery at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, where she also graduated in millinery. She has also worked with maestros such as Philip Treacy and Stephen Jones. She succeeds in combining different crafts, blurring the lines and blending registers to evoke dreamlike worlds. These plant-based pieces are perfect illustrations of this, and are a coherent extension of her work on the marvellous jewelry helmets bristling with acetate bands. One of these has been worn by Bjork, and two are in the MET’s permanent collection.

Maiko Takeda perfectly echoes what Issey Miyake used to say to his teams: “When you create, capture the essence of things. If you want to get the colour of a flower, go out into nature and pick wild flowers’.

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