It’s no secret that Steve Jobs’s favorite fashion designer was Issey Miyake. The former Apple CEO adopted the Japanese designer’s minimal black turtlenecks as part of the iconic uniform he wore on Keynote stages around the world, though apart from a mutual respect—and the facts that Miyake once appeared in Apple’s Think Different campaign and almost designed an Apple uniform—the duo never officially collaborated.
Until now. This month, Apple releases a collaboration with Issey Miyake, marking the tech brand’s first union with a fashion house since the Apple Watch Hermès in 2015. The product? A curious-looking rectangle of 3D-knitted fabric known as the iPhone Pocket. Robust and cushioned, with stretchy pleats true to Issey Miyake’s iconic Pleats Please design, the accessory is designed to snugly hold any model of iPhone (as well as small essentials like AirPods or a chapstick).
The iPhone Pocket comes in two lengths—one short enough to carry on the wrist and another that can be worn cross-body—as well as a spectrum of colors: three for the long design and eight for the short, that spans punchy brights like mandarin orange and peacock blue to subtler neutrals. The shorter version can also be tied up and used as a bag charm. Labubu who?
Like Issey Miyake and Apple’s greatest designs before it, the Pocket is deceptively simple. “At first glance, you probably wouldn’t recognise what it is,” says Yoshiyuki Miyamae, design director of the Miyake Design Studio (Issey Miayke’s parent company). A longtime staffer who joined the company in 2001 and worked closely alongside Miyake himself, Miyamae is in charge of A-POC ABLE, the label based on the late designer’s A Piece of Cloth concept, which examines the minutiae of clothes making. That fastidiousness and technical knowledge made him the perfect man for the job.
To bring the collaboration to fruition, Miyamae handpicked a talented trio of designers from across Issey Miyake to form a team, and they set about making prototypes. Some were crafted from paper, origami-style. They took their ideas to Apple’s HQ in Cupertino where they met with the industrial design team, and from there sparked a creative process that Miyamae likens to making music. “It was like a jazz session. Everyone brainstormed and asked, ‘how can we develop it further?’, ‘should we take it in this direction or that?’,” he says. “There was a mutual respect and understanding that made the process really efficient and productive.”
Happily for both sides, and perhaps because of the shared legacy of innovation, everything came together naturally. “We didn’t start with the idea of a collaboration, and in fact it really wasn’t the intention,” says Molly Anderson, Apple’s vice president of industrial design, on a video call from Cupertino. “We were interested in how they [at Issey Miyake] work, to see what we could learn from them, and the other way around.” A stylish Brit with blunt bangs and wireframe aviators, Anderson found an easy synergy with the Miyake team. “It has felt like a very organic relationship in terms of the personalities working together, without hierarchy, or without feeling like there was a pressure of expertise or scale or knowledge, but really a meeting of minds,” she says.
Colour choices for the iPhone Pocket were a key part of the two teams’ synergy. The aforementioned shade of mandarin, which Miyamae’s team proposed, was by total coincidence close to the new iPhone 17’s ‘Cosmic Orange’, at the time still unreleased. “We realised that the things that resonate with us are really very similar to things that resonate with them, so that was a lovely moment for us,” says Anderson.
Faithful to Apple’s history of paper engineering, the packaging comes with ceremony—and a Japanese twist. The long, frosted paper that contains the iPhone Pocket was inspired by the rice paper candy bags used for a Japanese children’s festival where long sweets are given to symbolise prayers for a healthy life ahead. For Miyamae, it evokes a childlike sense of excitement and anticipation: “The idea is that you’re opening a gift that’s full of candy.”
The accessory also signals how our phones are increasingly becoming part of our outfits; a natural extension of a phone case. “The way that people carry and style their products has changed and is becoming even more of an expression of yourself,” says Anderson. Working with a fashion house like Issey Miyake helps Apple adapt to the shift. “It allows us to be a bit more playful in terms of color, branding, and material…and to flex a little bit into other spaces. We’ve certainly learned things in the process, which perhaps influences our next round of packaging or next round of product,” she says.
Though Miyake and Jobs are not around to see it, there is a significance to the collaboration that transcends the product. “Both these great masterminds are now gone, but what we have in common is how we continue to challenge ourselves to be innovative, and to create new and original things,” says Miyamae. “It’s a moment of connecting the dots.”
The iPhone Pocket short strap will retail for $219 and the long strap for $329 from Friday November 14 at Apple Orchard Road Singapore and from apple.com.sg.
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
