There is a peculiar magic that happens when fashion designers step away from the runway. When they abandon the commercial machinery of retail and seasons, and instead immerse themselves in the ephemeral world of live performance. Satoshi Kondo, chief designer of the Issey Miyake women’s collection, just proved exactly why fashion thrives on a theater stage.
For Némo Flouret’s contemporary dance piece Derniers Feux, Kondo designed costumes for all eleven performers in a collaboration that integrates expressive garments with choreography and scenography. The result is a study in how clothing can become architecture, movement, and narrative all at once. Since its premiere at the 79th Festival d’Avignon in July 2025, the piece has traveled internationally, with recent performances at the Grand Palais in Paris from June 12 to 14.
Shared Creative Language
Kondo’s connection to Flouret runs deep. He has collaborated with the dancer and choreographer on two previous Issey Miyake women’s shows in Paris: Spring Summer 2024 and Autumn Winter 2025/26. Each time, Flouret’s rigorously researched physicality, rendered in a poetry of synchronized and de-synchronized motion, elevated the conventional runway into something closer to a ritual.
“There is this sense of physicality, something sensuous, that I find apparent in Flouret’s work,” Kondo reflected. “I see this project as an integration of our joint creativity, where I was able to immerse myself in the world Flouret created for Derniers Feux. Through a joyful journey of discussions and explorations, I found a way to comprehend and interpret the narrative in sartorial terms.“
What draws Satoshi Kondo to Flouret’s work is immediately apparent in any description of his process. Flouret’s engagement with the human body, his site-specific approach to performance, his ability to evoke sensuousness through movement, these are not foreign languages to a designer whose entire practice centers on understanding how fabric and form interact with the body in motion. This shared creative synergy across disciplines was the inevitable meeting point.
“There is this sense of physicality, something sensuous, that I find apparent in Flouret’s work,” Kondo reflected. “I see this project as an integration of our joint creativity, where I was able to immerse myself in the world Flouret created for Derniers Feux. Through a joyful journey of discussions and explorations, I found a way to comprehend and interpret the narrative in sartorial terms.“
Costumes as Living Scenography
Drawing on the technologies and craftsmanship developed for the Issey Miyake women’s collection, Kondo created original costumes featuring a mix of textures and versatile styles in a vibrant color palette. These are not passive garments adorning bodies. They evolve alongside the dynamic progression of the choreography, functioning as props, as architecture, as extensions of Flouret’s visual language.
“The sheer vibrancy I felt in Derniers Feux, the choreography, the scenography, the fireworks, and of course the performers themselves, was the source of my inspiration,” Kondo said. “In designing and making the costumes, my hope was to create something that intimately complements, if not elevates, the experience of Derniers Feux.”
What Derniers Feux Actually Is
Derniers Feux is a reverie on the ephemeral and the immaterial. Surrounded by a community of dancers and musicians, Flouret invents a show in the present, a world in reconstruction blending childhood and collective memory. The piece confronts fear and emotion through the lens of a final fireworks display, its performers moving in perpetual motion where dance becomes a mode of existence itself. They are simultaneously technicians, performers, and spectators, linking images that appear and disappear, giving life to dreams and nightmares with an exhilarating energy that transforms each moment as if it were, indefinitely, the last.
The piece continues its touring schedule, with upcoming performances in Charleroi, Belgium on September 18 and 19, 2026.
Issey Miyake Fall Winter 2026
Satoshi Kondo’s work on Derniers Feux is a natural extension of his design philosophy for Issey Miyake. The Fall Winter 2026 collection continues his exploration of physicality, textile innovation, and the relationship between body and garment. In Kondo’s hands, Issey Miyake remains a practice grounded in rigor, craft, and an uncompromising belief that fashion at its highest expression is about understanding how humans move through space.
Discover more of the Derniers Feux performance and costumes by Satoshi Kondo for it in our gallery:
This is what happens when designers are given permission to create beyond the commercial calendar. The result is not just beautiful clothing or stunning choreography. It is proof that fashion’s truest stage has always been anywhere that celebrates the human body in all its complexity and motion.
