Henri Matisse made The Snail in Nice in 1953, the year before he died, from his bed. Unable by then to stand at a canvas, he had assistants paint sheets of paper in gouache, cut or tore shapes from them himself, and directed where each piece should be pinned to the wall, repositioning them until he was satisfied and only then having them pasted down. The finished work is close to three metres square, its shapes arranged in a loose spiral that evokes the ‘unrolling’ he had noticed while drawing a snail.
When the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake design team stood in front of it at Tate Modern last year, its size surprised them. ‘There is a vibrancy to it, as if all the pieces are still moving,’ they tell Wallpaper* now (the brand runs without a formal head designer). ’They are so dynamic, so light, as if they are ready to break out from the frame.’ The idea for the second edition of Open Studio emerged: at this scale, why not turn each cut-out into a garment?
Open Studio began in 2025, when Homme Plissé stepped off the Paris show calendar to present in places the brand had never been, opening its way of working to view as an artist opens a studio. The first edition, at Villa Medicea della Petraia during Pitti Uomo, paired a show with an exhibition of the pleating tests and colour studies behind it. Around the time the design team were considering where Open Studio should go next, Tate got in touch. The museum has a history of working with designers on collections drawn from works it holds, and an edition built around a single artwork, which the brand had never attempted, suited a format concerned with opening up a way of making; from the permanent collection they chose The Snail.
When asked what values of founder Issey Miyake they brought into the project, the design team spoke of creative freedom: ‘He always told us to trust and follow our own curiosity,’ they say. Matisse described the cut-outs as drawing straight into the colour. ‘If you're an artist, you can cut whatever you want, in whatever way you want,’ they point out. To meet the challenge of representing a flat painting with garments, they began by tracing The Snail; they had never worked with a painting this way, and had fun doing so, finding it most rewarding how literally each cut-out came to life on a body: ‘We're not just talking the talk, the painting is literally moving. We’re really animating the painting itself.’
That fluidity extended to Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, with whom the design team shared their research process (including the documents Tate had supplied on Matisse’s final years) so that the set and clothing formed in lockstep, symbiotically, each informing the other as it developed. ‘Set design is never an afterthought,’ they maintain. Vanderbroeck, whose background is in theatre, built the tank in layers – both literal and philosophical – understanding that the room would be a different one by the end of the evening. ‘It cannot exist without the dancers and the dancers cannot exist without the set.’
The floor of the south tank was covered in white felt, cut into flat shapes and laid flush, with the garments beneath it. Dancers from Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company lifted the shapes away one at a time between sessions of One One One, Ioannis Mandafounis's improvised form in which a dancer continues for as long as a single spectator maintains eye contact; by the end they had uncovered the whole of The Snail at the centre of the room, every one of Matisse's shapes made up of a pleated garment laid flat, before changing into the capsule to finish.
In Matisse’s studio, the shapes had been pinned where he pointed, and moved when he changed his mind; the finished work keeps something of that provisional state in its torn edges and overlapping corners, the movement an echo of pieces that once moved. Circulating again as garments, on bodies, across a floor, the cut-outs had for one evening a freedom they lost when they were pasted down, ‘It’s starting flat, it’s being worn, and then it’s being left behind,’ Vanderbroeck says.
Homme Plissé has worked with an artist’s hand before Open Studio existed: its A/W 2024 collection, shown on the Paris runway, was made with Ronan Bouroullec, whose felt-tip drawings were printed across the clothes, with printed garments hung along the walls of Palais de Tokyo as the backdrop. The house called it a creative session. Where Bouroullec’s drawings were applied to the garments, the garments at Tate Modern were themselves assembled into the artwork, so that laid flat on the floor of the tank they were the collage, and worn they were the collage in motion.
The capsule, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate, runs to a printed cardigan, tunic and T-shirt seeing the composition’s blocks of orange, lilac, cobalt and green on white pleated jersey; a long-sleeved top in the collage’s palette; a crossbody bag; and a diamond-shaped scarf. Between the first visit and the floor of the tank, the idea itself barely changed, and that, more than anything made along the way, is what the design team find innovative. ‘That pure idea was carried from the drawing board to the final realisation,’ they say. ‘To us, that is something new.’
Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate is available from 17 September 2026 at Tate Shops and shop.tate.org.uk for a limited time, then from January 2027 at Issey Miyake stores in Tokyo, Osaka and London.