The poster was responding to photos on the Montessori’s website of the teachers’ uniforms: raspberry, cobalt and apple green dresses in plissé fabric. They appeared to be from the Pleats Please line by Japanese designer Issey Miyake. It seemed an avant-garde choice for staff posing in front of the abachi and blond wood toys of their preschool classroom.
On X, those pictures were screen grabbed and viewed 3.5m times, with most comments reading along the lines of “only in Brooklyn”. Over email from Taiwan, Ms Lam Montessori head of school, Stephanie Woo – a vision in chartreuse pleated fabric and matching hexagonal-framed glasses on the nursery’s website – explains that the dresses are actually by a more affordable Japanese designer, Yamasaki Takashi (they are priced around a 10th of the $700 one might pay for a Pleats Please frock), and are worn at all of the company’s locations. Ms Lam is a Mandarin immersion school and was originally founded in Taipei, Taiwan, where it has 14 branches, as well as its five in Brooklyn.
Woo is herself a “huge fan” of Issey Miyake, and owns “a couple of pieces that I bring out for special events at the school”. She adds: “Issey Miyake clothing is of course stunning, but we chose Yamasaki for its understated designs, comfort, durability and price. Those qualities made it a particularly good fit for everyday life in our classrooms,” she writes, adding that the clothes wash well and “hold their color and shape beautifully.
Even after we’ve washed it 100 times, they still come out of the dryer looking much the same.” She adds that the outfits were originally her mother’s idea – the original Ms Lam – who, according to the company’s website, was the first person to bring Montessori to Taiwan. Staff in Taiwan have been wearing them for 12 years and in Brooklyn for eight. Uniforms are important, she says, working with children from the age of one to six: “They help a young child recognize, even on a busy campus, this adult can help me.” One of the reasons the Issey Miyake-esque outfits so delighted the internet is that the Pleats Please line, which launched in 1993, is having a fashion resurgence.
One particular garment – the Madame T stole, a large piece of plissé fabric with a diamond-shaped neck hole, which comes with an instruction booklet for the many ways it can be folded around the body – has recently become a social media fascination. In August, the shopping platform Lyst ranked it among the hottest products of the summer, and reported a 100% rise in demand for Issey Miyake quarter-on-quarter. That said, Issey Miyake – which was launched in 1970 in Tokyo – and its more affordable Pleats Please line has never really been uncool.
Miyake was the first of the wave of Japanese designers – followed by Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons – to break through into European fashion. Miyake developed his then revolutionary near-permanent pleats in the late 1980s, by constructing garments first, flat, at a much larger size than they would eventually fold down to, then heat-pleating afterwards. Most Pleats Please garments are 100% polyester, and their popularity comes despite a larger polyester backlash.
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