Overlooked No Far more: Junichi Arai, Innovative Textile Designer
Arai, who died at 85 in 2017, experimented with a nylon-coated polyester that appeared like the gossamer wings of a butterfly he claimed it could be created into raincoats weighing much less than 4 ounces. He made a four-layered jacquard with squares on just one facet and triangles on the other. He mastered the artwork of blending manual techniques, like tie-dyeing, with the applications of personal computers and other substantial technology.
“There are a number of matters that produced him a single of the most crucial ground breaking thinkers in textile layout,” Matilda McQuaid, a co-curator of the 1998 exhibit “Structure and Floor: Modern day Japanese Textiles” at the Museum of Modern-day Artwork in New York, wrote in an e mail. “The initially is his enthusiasm for experimentation, from destroying the floor, shrinking the material, to making use of standard methods with new supplies, like weaving with stainless steel.”
Beginning in the 1970s, manner designers like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo gave Arai world wide recognition inside the fashion and textile industries by using his wearable, yet wildly ingenious, fabrics in their personal creations.
“He is the finest influence on textile structure in the environment currently,” Jack Lenor Larsen, the American textile designer, reported in introducing Arai at a lecture in 2004 at the Trend Institute of Technological innovation in Manhattan.
Arai’s textiles are in the permanent collections of many museums, like MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Rhode Island College of Design and style Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Junichi Arai was born on March 13, 1932, in Kiryu, Japan, the eldest of six children of Kinzo and Naka Arai. Kinzo Arai commenced the family’s weaving company, Arakin Textile (also termed Arakin Orimono), in the 1920s, earning obis. It was based mostly in Kiryu, about 80 miles northwest of Tokyo.
Junichi Arai dismantled his father’s organization in 1966, grew to become an unbiased textile planner and began his have corporation, ARS, which went bankrupt in 1978. That exact same 12 months, he set up Anthology, which also went bankrupt, in 1987. Nevertheless, he was endlessly inventive.
Arai, who died at 85 in 2017, experimented with a nylon-coated polyester that appeared like the gossamer wings of a butterfly he claimed it could be created into raincoats weighing much less than 4 ounces. He made a four-layered jacquard with squares on just one facet and triangles on the other. He mastered the artwork of blending manual techniques, like tie-dyeing, with the applications of personal computers and other substantial technology.
“There are a number of matters that produced him a single of the most crucial ground breaking thinkers in textile layout,” Matilda McQuaid, a co-curator of the 1998 exhibit “Structure and Floor: Modern day Japanese Textiles” at the Museum of Modern-day Artwork in New York, wrote in an e mail. “The initially is his enthusiasm for experimentation, from destroying the floor, shrinking the material, to making use of standard methods with new supplies, like weaving with stainless steel.”
Beginning in the 1970s, manner designers like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo gave Arai world wide recognition inside the fashion and textile industries by using his wearable, yet wildly ingenious, fabrics in their personal creations.
“He is the finest influence on textile structure in the environment currently,” Jack Lenor Larsen, the American textile designer, reported in introducing Arai at a lecture in 2004 at the Trend Institute of Technological innovation in Manhattan.
Arai’s textiles are in the permanent collections of many museums, like MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Rhode Island College of Design and style Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Junichi Arai was born on March 13, 1932, in Kiryu, Japan, the eldest of six children of Kinzo and Naka Arai. Kinzo Arai commenced the family’s weaving company, Arakin Textile (also termed Arakin Orimono), in the 1920s, earning obis. It was based mostly in Kiryu, about 80 miles northwest of Tokyo.
Junichi Arai dismantled his father’s organization in 1966, grew to become an unbiased textile planner and began his have corporation, ARS, which went bankrupt in 1978. That exact same 12 months, he set up Anthology, which also went bankrupt, in 1987. Nevertheless, he was endlessly inventive.