Ethnicity

The first great semantic opposition in human dress was that between flat, uncut, unsewn, two-dimensional fabric, typical of Asia, with its many definitions and workmanship— ao-dai,hanbok, kimono, lungi, sari, and many others, which all stand in the various languages for “a piece of cloth”—and three-dimensional fabric, i.e. cut and sewn, characteristic of the European sartorial silhouette. The Issey Miyake collection APOC (launched in 1971) is a good example. It is described as clothing made from “a Piece of Cloth,” a concept that explores not only the relationship between the body and clothing, but also the space that is born between them