Dai Fujiwara for Issey Miyake

It started when the Alvar Aalto Design Seminar brought together a bunch of people in the field of design, in August 2007. Designers, manufacturers and researchers around the world. It was a two day event in Jyväskylä (Finland, North of Helsinki) where the participants discussed their own creative work under the theme It’s a Beautiful Day. The theme was chosen and developed by Ilkka Suppanen, Finnish designer and chairman of the seminar. It is also a call for all people and communities to make a difference, make the world more sustainable using the means they have at their disposal.

The seminar days inspired Issey Miyake's Creative Director Dai Fujiwara (Japan) to propose another Beautiful Day, a multi-creative joint project between different cultures. At the end of his speech, Fujiwara made an announcement: he and his team promised to design the wedding costumes for a Finnish couple to be married by the end of the year. Then he suggested that all the keynote speakers came together to contribute to the wedding... The theme? It’s a Beautiful Day.

The Beautiful Day to-be-married couple, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström are entrepreneurs with a mission to bring people closer together, and live in San Francisco with their baby son Eliel. They did not come from among the seminar audience. In a party where Laura Sarvilinna popped into as a guest of Ulla-Maaria,  they began talking about marriage. Laura mentioned Dai Fujiwara’s promise and wondered aloud if that would encourage Ulla-Maaria and Jyri to get married. Ulla proposed to Jyri the next day and Dai Fujiwara confirmed to Laura that the offer was still on. In keeping with the Finnish tradition, the wedding day: 29 February, is a topsy-turvy day when women can take the initiative and pop the question. If the suitor is rejected, she gets the cloth for a skirt as compensation.

The wedding was held at Studio Aalto at the end of February. The white-rendered, wall-like, closed-in mass of the building conceals a garden shaped like an amphitheatre in its inner courtyard.
The Kide Wedding Dress by Issey Miyake

This bridal dress, when folded, is a flat hexagon. It is unexpected when it becomes a perfectly fitted three-dimensional dress, much like a pop-up picture. The name Kide is Finnish for crystal, hexagons are often found in nature in snow crystals or honeycombs and it's considered one of the most stable structures.

The dress is constructed of multiple layers of off-white material hexagons in a spiral. The material is 55% silk, 43% polyester and 2 % rayon. The buttons (also used as corsages), by Hella Jongerius, are essential in the dress's design. Wedding dresses are often stored and treasured in the closet after the wedding, but the Kide dress is stored in uniquely designed hexagonal box until it is used again. The box is made of paulownia, which is wood traditionally used for the famous Japanese wooden boxes.

The Kide dress was part of the Issey Miyake Autumn - Winter 2008 collection, and was shown in Paris Fashion Week (26 February 2008).