LONDON — Homme Plissé Issey Miyake used Tate Modern’s South Tank to do something fashion rarely attempts with a museum masterpiece: take Henri Matisse’s *The Snail* (1953) off the wall, remake its paper shapes as pleated garments, and let dancers and visitors finish the collage in real time. The second edition of the label’s OPEN STUDIO, staged on 16 September 2026, paired that performance with a limited capsule that went on sale the next day at Tate shops and online.
Tate’s press office, Wallpaper* and Designboom all place the night inside a deliberate collaboration. The museum holds *The Snail* in its permanent collection — Matisse’s late cut-out, nearly three metres square, composed from gouache-painted paper after illness confined him to bed. Homme Plissé’s design team, which works without a named head designer, said the idea was simple and literal: animate each cut-out by translating it into a garment, using the house’s signature pleating so colour and geometry could move on bodies rather than stay pinned flat.
How OPEN STUDIO remade the painting
OPEN STUDIO began in 2025 as a way for Homme Plissé to step off the Paris show calendar and open its process in places the brand had not shown before. The first edition, at Villa Medicea della Petraia during Pitti Uomo, mixed a presentation with an exhibition of pleating tests. For the London chapter, Tate approached the label about a collection drawn from a single work in its holdings — a format the brand had not tried. From the permanent collection, the team chose *The Snail*.
Inside the South Tank, Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck covered the floor in white felt cut into flat shapes, with garments hidden beneath. Dancers from Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, under artistic director Ioannis Mandafounis, lifted sections of felt between sessions of *One One One* — Mandafounis’s improvised format in which a dancer creates choreography for as long as a single spectator maintains eye contact. Guests sat along the circular concrete wall and on seats closer to the centre, so watching and being watched kept swapping places.
As the evening progressed, performers put on the revealed pieces. Shapes familiar from Matisse’s spiral — orange, lilac, cobalt, green against white — stretched across shoulders and torsos while pleats expanded and contracted. Discarded garments were laid back across the floor, echoing the provisional paper forms Matisse once moved around his studio before they were pasted down. By the close, dancers pulled back the central felt to expose a full-scale reconstruction of *The Snail* assembled from the pleated clothes themselves: image, then body, then image again.
The capsule now in shops
The commercial layer is Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate, a capsule Tate describes as a 10-piece range. Printed snail-motif pieces include a button-front pleated cardigan, sleeveless tunic and short-sleeved T-shirt; a long-sleeved palette top comes in white, black, orange, emerald green and purple; accessories include a pleated crossbody bag and a diamond-shaped scarf. Elizabeth Lovatt, Tate’s head of merchandise, called *The Snail* “an extraordinary expression of colour, movement and creative freedom,” and said the capsule lets audiences meet an iconic Tate work through fashion and movement.
Availability is staggered. From 17 September 2026 the capsule is sold for a limited time at Tate Modern’s Terrace Shop and at shop.tate.org.uk. From January 2027, selected Issey Miyake stores stocking Homme Plissé in Tokyo, Osaka and London will carry it. Matisse’s original remains on free display in Tate Modern’s permanent collection — a parallel track that keeps the source work accessible while the collaboration sells wearable editions of its palette and geometry.
Why the story matters beyond one night
Fashion–museum capsules are common; rarer is a live format that treats garments as the collage itself. Wallpaper* quotes the design team on carrying a “pure idea” from first visit to final realisation without diluting it — and on Issey Miyake’s instruction to trust curiosity. Designboom emphasises how the Tank’s seating embeds the public inside the choreography rather than facing a fixed front. For readers outside London, the news is less a runway review than evidence that a Japanese pleating house and a British public museum are betting that Matisse’s cut-out logic still reads as contemporary design: colour first, outline second, movement as the proof.
What to watch next is whether OPEN STUDIO becomes a recurring Tate partnership or a one-off anniversary of the format, how quickly the limited capsule sells through, and whether similar single-artwork editions follow at other museums. For now, *The Snail* has had one evening of freedom Matisse’s pasted paper lost in 1953 — and a shop-floor afterlife in pleats.
This article draws on Tate’s 17 September 2026 press release and reporting from Wallpaper* and Designboom. Quotes follow those outlets.