Loth to give interviews, Miyake had a pronounced limp – a result of surviving the 1945 atomic bomb dropped on his home town of Hiroshima when he was seven. Three years later, his mother died of radiation exposure. Miyake never expected to reach old age. He was born in Hiroshima, the son of an army officer and a teacher, and evacuated to a nearby small town during the second world war. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, he was at primary school when he saw the flash of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven-year-old Miyake set out alone for the family house, 2.3km from the blast centre, searching among the heaped dead and dying for his mother. Nature is the best perfumer in the world. It is this belief that has underpinned the creation of every iconic Issey Miyake fragrance since 1992.

Mikyake saw technology as a solution to the problem of overproduction, with one such solution the late 90’s “One Piece of Cloth” idea (later known as A-POC) which pioneered the idea of making clothes out of a single tube of fabric, cutting down and waste and showing exactly what could be done with a knitting machine, a computer and the right knowhow. A star-like creation for Issey Miyake during the 1999-2000 autumn-winter ready-to-wear collections. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/EPAGrowing up just outside Hiroshima, Issey Miyake witnessed the atomic bomb explosion in 1945 in his city, aged 7. His mother died three years later, after being badly burned, and he suffered from radiation-related diseases. Photograph: Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters A keen sportsman, function became the linchpin of Miyake’s work. His most famous and most affordable clothes, the Pleats Please line, was launched in 1993 as a retort to the price and unwearability of high-end fashion. Above all, he had unusual respect for materials derived from fossil fuels, seeing plastic, nylon and all the polys not as cheap disposable substitutes for natural substances, but as themselves having unique properties – polyfibres he developed with adventurous manufacturers were machine-washable, uncrushable, stretchy and kind to skin. Hi-tech production processes reduced yarn as well as fabric waste; his garments were visually timeless and made to last physically. Miyake never thought of hydrocarbons as infinite resources to burn. Their complex chemistry and potential uses were precious – the heat of long-gone suns made clothes and ingredients for his water-themed perfumes, starting with L’Eau d’Issey in 1992. In the 21st century, his Tokyo Reality Lab recycled plastic bottle tops into durable, wearable cloth. I am most interested in people and the human form,” Miyake told the New York Times in 2014. “Clothing is the closest thing to all humans.”

Miyake went on to New York in 1969 as an assistant for Geoffrey Beene, to learn about mass production. But in 1970, another bout of radiation-related disease returned him to Tokyo for treatment, where friends loaned him the money to start Miyake Design Studio. In his remarkable first show in Tokyo, a model stripped off many layers until nude, a scandal that alarmed his sponsors and made clear his originality.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Miyake studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo. But piqued by the crossover between disciplines, he pivoted to fashion and moved to Paris to become an apprentice to Guy Laroche and eventually work for Hubert de Givenchy around the time Audrey Hepburn was wearing his dresses.