Teachers at a Brooklyn Montessori preschool became an unexpected viral sensation last week after a Reddit user asked why they all wear Issey Miyake every day. The comment, posted on the Williamsburg subreddit, sparked thousands of reactions and left many wondering about the chic uniforms seen on the school's website.
The photos showed teachers in raspberry, cobalt, and apple green pleated dresses that appeared to be from Issey Miyake's Pleats Please line. The images were shared on X, where they were viewed 3.5 million times, with many comments saying "only in Brooklyn."
The Truth Behind the Uniforms
In an email from Taiwan, Stephanie Woo, head of school at Ms Lam Montessori, clarified that the dresses are actually by a more affordable Japanese designer, Yamasaki Takashi. They are priced at around a tenth of the $700 one might pay for a Pleats Please frock and are worn at all of the company's locations.
Ms Lam is a Mandarin immersion school originally founded in Taipei, Taiwan, where it has 14 branches, plus five in Brooklyn. Woo is herself a "huge fan" of Issey Miyake and owns "a couple of pieces that I bring out for special events at the school." She explained, "Issey Miyake clothing is of course stunning, but we chose Yamasaki for its understated designs, comfort, durability and price. Those qualities made it a particularly good fit for everyday life in our classrooms." She added that the clothes wash well and "hold their color and shape beautifully. Even after we've washed it 100 times, they still come out of the dryer looking much the same."
The uniforms were originally the idea of Woo's mother, the original Ms Lam, who according to the company's website was the first person to bring Montessori to Taiwan. Staff in Taiwan have been wearing them for 12 years and in Brooklyn for eight. Woo noted that uniforms are important when working with children from age one to six: "They help a young child recognize, even on a busy campus, this adult can help me."
Issey Miyake's Fashion Resurgence
One reason the Issey Miyake-esque outfits delighted the internet is that the Pleats Please line, launched in 1993, is having a fashion resurgence. One particular garment, the Madame T stole, a large piece of plissé fabric with a diamond-shaped neck hole that comes with an instruction booklet for folding, has recently become a social media fascination. In August, the shopping platform Lyst ranked it among the hottest products of the summer and reported a 100% rise in demand for Issey Miyake quarter-on-quarter.
Issey Miyake, launched in 1970 in Tokyo, and its Pleats Please line have never really been uncool. Miyake was the first of the wave of Japanese designers—followed by Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons—to break through into European fashion. He developed his revolutionary near-permanent pleats in the late 1980s by constructing garments first, flat, at a much larger size than they would eventually fold down to, then heat-pleating afterwards. Most Pleats Please garments are 100% polyester, and their popularity comes despite a larger polyester backlash. Unlike fast-fashion polyester, Pleats Please are high quality, the designs timeless, and the construction makes specific use of polyester's thermoplastic properties to hold shape.
Pleats Please's practical, technical, and arty associations—with focus on the garment's silhouette rather than the body beneath—have made it popular with accomplished creative women for decades. Zaha Hadid, Solange Knowles, Meryl Streep, Tessa Thompson, and Joni Mitchell are among its longtime fans, while Lorde, who wore a neon pink Pleats Please crop top at Lollapalooza, and Doja Cat have been spotted wearing the designer more recently.
Cultural Perspectives on the Look
In the west, says Dr Sasha Raspopina, course leader for the fashion marketing and journalism BA at London Metropolitan University, Pleats Please has a kind of "if you know you know" appeal. She has noticed its adoption in east London among young people who are perhaps "trying to signal that they are creative." Given that context, Raspopina thought the Montessori image was a meme at first because the garment seemed to speak of an "alternate universe" to that of the kindergarten teacher.
The use of a Pleats Please-inspired garment may land differently for an east Asian audience, says Prof Wessie Ling, a visiting professor of transcultural arts and design at the University of Bologna. As a fashion scholar, she knew the dresses weren't genuine Miyake the moment she saw the photo: "the materials, and how it drapes on the body isn't quite there," she says. She notes that the link between Japanese design and Taiwan is very deep, given the colonial history (Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule from 1895 until 1945). In east Asia more broadly, there is a profound "admiration for Japanese designers, specifically the first generation of Japanese designers." Miyake was the first to open a boutique in Paris, in the 1970s, nearly 10 years before Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. This was at a time when "absolutely no other non-white designers made it into the fashion capital. So he represents something." In east Asia, she says, Miyake is "the signature Japanese designer" and the first designer brand a woman would turn to if they reached executive level.
Ling had not heard of the brand Yamasaki Takashi, but she has noticed many younger, independent east Asian designers, including those based in South Korea and Vietnam, recently using pleats similar to Miyake's. She doesn't necessarily consider them to be copycats. "Obviously it is a kind of Miyake because it's pleats – but they also create different patterns, colors and silhouettes, and they are putting some thought into the pleats they are trying to create."
As Woo adds over email, the aesthetic of the garments certainly matters, even at school: "The truth is, we believe young children should be surrounded by beauty. From birth to age six, children have what Montessori calls the 'Absorbent Mind' – they effortlessly absorb so much from their surroundings," she says. "They are naturally drawn to beauty, and by making it part of their daily lives, we hope to nurture their appreciation for it and their desire to care for the spaces and things around them."
