Yoko Miyake embarked on her career in fashion at an early age.  At 16 she left her native Hiroshima, for the UK with this sole goal in mind.  An alumni of Central Saint Martins, she went on to study at London College of Fashion and Institut Français de la Mode. Her keen eye for cut and form lead her to the key positions of Assistant Studio Director at Balenciaga, and then Assistant Designer at Givenchy Couture. Yoko's career as a designer resulted in many accolades including two features in i-D magazine. As she pursued her career as a designer, she began feel that her true calling was not to design fashion, but to arrange, edit and orchestrate it. Since May 2006 she established herself as a freelance stylist and soon found herself  working with top photographers including Serge Leblon, Daniele Duella and Iango Henzi, Steve Hiatt and Jean-Francois Lepage.  Besides working as Fashion Editor of commons&sense and commons&sense man, Yoko's work has been featured in top publications including Purple Fashion, Vogue Nippon, Ryuko Tsushin, Rodeo, Big and French.

Your work has a quality of approachable artistry, what would you say is the principal characteristic of your styling?


I like to keep things as realistic as possible. It is important for me - for things to make sense,  like a  beautiful picture with a beautiful girl doesn’t make sense unless it’s really strikingly amazing. As a result, when there is no theme or reference (and)  it’s difficult for me to work.  It’s important for me  to know the photographer that I am working with, and their approach and sensibilities-- I cannot imagine a girl and not see what we are shooting and select pieces for her out of the blue. It’s important for me to see all the theme elements, so I can ask "who is this woman?" “Is she elegant, sexy or trash?” I need to imagine all of this background and context so that I feel confident arriving on set with suitcases with the right looks. So working with a photographer, we are always talking about themes, posing and feelings that we are trying to reach before my work begins in selecting looks for a story. This way we can infuse the personalities of what we are trying to achieve and ultimately,  so that we can get the reader's attention immediately.

Do you attempt to reinvent your styling approach for your collaborations?


I think I'm a bit of a chameleon. When I see a photographer's work ,  I try to get the best out of what they do and I combine this with how the pieces that I select would work with our goals. I imagine how the fabric moves and style of the silhouettes, and what kind of the figures are embodied in our subjects and how it translates best with their lighting or type of style. For me, if I try to do something completely out of their universe it’s not worth it, so I try to find a mixture  of what I can do and what they can do and try to get the best solution out of our chosen theme and its  direction.

Does your background in design affect your styling (inevitably) but does your approach tend to be more structural and thought-out as a result?

Yes, it does. For example, I recently consulted for a mainstream trouser company and they wanted to rework their image and do a “show." I was there with their designer trying to get some show pieces but still kept the client’s brand in mind.  I felt like I used all my experience from my background as a designer and also my skills as a stylist. I wanted to become a stylist when I was 14 but, more so for windows which led me to fashion school. But, in Japan there weren’t too many choices and to add I needed to be 18 to enroll anywhere.  So I moved to London and went to Central Saint Martins and then I forgot that I wanted to be a stylist and I became a designer.

After studying for 6-7 years, I figured that I should be a designer after putting so much effort into it. I think that now everything  is connected   I know how the fabric moves and how it reflects, how it affects  bad/good matching, their proportions and the silhouettes...and all of it really helps with my work as a stylist.





Happy Fingers!| Damien Blottière| Illustration: Jeanne Detallante | commons&sense man | November 2008

Why did you choose this work?


The thing about Damien is that he is very brilliant, he used to work at Givenchy and when I was Assistant Designer at the house, they used to tell me all the time about him, how great he is; so I  had an initial draw to his work. Once I saw his work, however, I fell in love with it and because it was something I had never seen before in pictures. He was putting images in a cube and creating objects with cubes and basically creating another image within the image.  There was something of  a different dimension where there is a level of depth in this universe that is very unique. I met him to do the proposal for commons &sense Man and he is very inspirational and now we work together for commons&sense Man all the time.

 

In addition to styling, often you have a hand in editorial themes chosen for layouts.  How did this come to be since it is an interesting collaboration with both photographer Damien Blottière, Jeanne Detallante's illustration and yourself?


The way we work together is that Damien brings me his thoughts on theme, and we work together from there - as a starting point to develop a editorial concept. For this he wanted to something about The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. It's a 1953 musical fantasy film. It is best known for being the only feature film ever written by Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), who was responsible for the story, screenplay, and lyrics. The film's sets are amazing.  We knew we didn't want to do something literal so we talked about how he could cut up the papers and place them around our sets to create depth. We also knew that we wanted to use Cole since he has that kind of ‘cheeky child-like ’ sensibility which works great for this project. Then with Jeanne Detallante, an amazing illustrator, I've always wanted to work with her,  Damien who is also good friends with her, had the idea of taking the images to (her) after and having her add the fantasy part with her element of illustration to the images and I think the result is amazing.



 Serge Leblon | Purple  magazine #6 | The Genealogy of Morals Fall/Winter 2006

Why did you chose this work?

Besides the fact this was my first Purple story, I was assisting for a few months in Paris, and then Purple was my first job as a proper "fashion person." Oliver (Zham) had so many names he wanted to put in a story and he suggested why don’t you do the styling, and so it was my first editorial and I had been a fan of Serge even as a student .   I would look at his images and think that he was so talented. His work is so real and its not too fantasy but it is inherently “fashion” but fashion is not the main thing in the pictures he takes.

The story looks like a juxtaposition of two characters, where the styling almost plays a role as a third character--is this the case in every work or this one in particular?


I think it’s more thanks to Serge , although I choose looks and I can (kind)of imagine how each element will work in story, he wanted to have a little bit a soft S&M element of a story of this lesbian couple that had an approachable softness. With the casting he knew the models very well so everything came together to create this feeling.  I think, however, Serge captured the images with all of its layers and elements to have the cinematic feel while simultaneously using the lighting and the location. His vision of this was to have a filmmaker approach. I was not necessarily thinking of creating a character from the styling but he managed to put everything together and it worked. What I like about this story is that it is timeless, but of course any stylist or someone ‘well versed’ in fashion can tell the image was taken circa 2000, but the styling is very classic and I like that.

In editorials that are essay-story driven how do you begin to place or design an overall look that is shown through various individual looks?


 For this, while I was working on this story there were 25 others plus the cover shoot as well that I had on my plate, so I had to find those looks from the collections available which could fit in the story and the others. There went so many choices and the juggling of trying to make the best out of what I had.  For this story, I imagined a female figure that is sexy and luxurious, slightly hard and elegant and that kind of selection together with casting and everything together made for to be a layered approach to get the image.



 Marcus Mam| Rodeo Magazine |Issue 47: Muoversi A Tempo | May 2008


Why did you choose this work?

Marcus and I work a lot as well and he's very good at taking photos of celebrities and personalities. He has an amazing eye to capturing some kind of character or personality out of a smile or out of a little gesture .We talked about integrating his fashion sensibility with this talent and to bring his charm and personal element to a shoot.  A lot of times for fashion stories, we're unable to book a celebrity or supermodels so to use a model to get an a celebrity's feel is an even greater challenge. So we had this idea to use Madonna as inspiration as a iconic image for a fashion story and use this model to capture this idea.

So I was really excited to use her as reference because with Madonna you don't have to be "stylistically correct."  You do a mess and it doesn't need to necessarily be pretty or well ironed and there is a messiness to bring out the punk element to the look. That kind of style is really there, and as a result everyone knows Madonna and it’s easy to accept her imagery because  of this.