He's now one of the world's most legendary designers, but 71-year-old Issey Miyake has a haunting past. The Japanese fashion designer was just seven years old when the first atomic bomb was dropped on his home town of Hiroshima, and recently revealed that the experience still haunts him. ‘When I close my eyes, I still see things that no one should ever experience', he writes in a New York Times column translated from the Japanese, ‘a bright-red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape. I remember it all.' And although speaking on the subject previously made him uncomfortable, he now feels a ‘personal and moral responsibility to speak out' after trying unsuccessfully to put the experience behind him. In fact, he even thinks the experience is one of the reasons he became a designer: ‘I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.' [Fashionologie]
