Issey Miyake
Purity of water as the essence of Japanese design.
Issey Miyake established his Tokyo-based fashion house in 1970, building a reputation for structural invention and dialogue between Japanese craft traditions and Western fashion forms. The fragrance division launched in 1992 with L'Eau d'Issey, a composition by Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud that framed aquatic-floral perfumery in a deliberately spare, futuristic vocabulary — a transparent bottle, a water-based opening, a formula designed to evoke clean surface rather than botanical specificity. The release helped define the 1990s aquatic genre and was widely imitated. Subsequent releases — Noa, A Scent, L'Eau d'Issey pour Homme — maintain the same aesthetic grammar: clarity, structural lightness, and compositions that evoke water and light as organizing principles. The house's fragrance identity is Japanese in its restraint — less is asserted, more is implied. Prices sit in the accessible-prestige range, making Issey Miyake fragrances broadly available without sacrificing compositional intention, and the house continues to attract buyers who value concept as much as scent profile.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
