Eiko Ishioka

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1938, Eiko Ishioka was an Oscar winning costume designer known for her work in major films such as The Cell, The Fall, Immortals, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.  She attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.  In 1985 she received an award at the Cannes Film Festival for her artistic contributions in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Ishioka then went on to win a Grammy Award in 1987 for the Miles Davis' album artwork and two Tony Award nominations for her costume design in the Broadway play M. Butterfly.  In 2002, she art directed Björk's music video "Cocoon" before passing away in 2012.

Eiko Ishioka (石岡 瑛子 Ishioka Eiko?, July 12, 1938 – January 21, 2012) was a Japanese art director, costume and graphic designer known for her work in stage, screen, advertising and print media.[1][2] Noted for her advertising campaigns for the Japanese boutique chain Parco, she designed uniforms and outerwear for members of the Swiss, Canadian, Japanese and Spanish teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and was the director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.[3] She won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula and was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award in the same category for her work in Tarsem Singh’s 2012 film Mirror Mirror.[4]

Ishioka was born in Tokyo to a commercial graphic designer father and a housewife mother. Although her father encouraged her interest in art as a child, he discouraged her ambition to follow him into the business.[5] She graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.[6]

Eiko began her career with the advertising division of the cosmetics company Shiseido in 1961 and won Japan’s most prestigious advertising award four years later. Eiko was discovered by Tsuji Masuda who created Parco Ikebukuro from the ailing Marubutsu Department Store. When Parco did well and expanded to a Shibuya location in 1973, Eiko designed Parco Shibuya's first 15 second commercial for the grand opening with "a tall, thin black woman, dressed in a black bikini, dancing with a very small man in a Santa Claus outfit". She became deeply involved in Parco's image. Her last Parco campaign involved Faye Dunaway as "face of Parco" wearing black, on a black chair against a black wall, and peeling and eating an egg in one minute as "a film for Parco."[7] She became its chief art director in 1971 and her work there is noted for several campaigns featuring Faye Dunaway and for its open and surreal eroticism. In 1983 she ended her association with Parco and opened her own design firm.

In 2003 she designed the logo for the Houston Rockets.[8][9]

In 1985 director Paul Schrader chose her to be the production designer for his 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Her work went on to win her a special award for artistic contribution at the Cannes Film Festival that year. Eiko's work with Francis Ford Coppola on the poster for the Japanese release of Apocalypse Now led to their later collaboration in Coppola's Dracula which fetched Eiko her first Academy Award.[10] She has also worked on four of Tarsem Singh's films beginning with the Jennifer Lopez starrer The Cell in 2000 and including The Fall, Immortals and the Oscar nominated Mirror Mirror.[11]

She has also done costume design for theater and circus. In 1999 she designed costumes for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Dutch Opera. She designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil: Varekai, which premiered in 2002 as well as for Julie Taymor's Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which premiered in 2011. She also directed the music video for Björk's "Cocoon" in 2002 and designed costumes for the "Hurricane" tour of singer Grace Jones in 2009.[12]

Ishioka's work is included in the permanent collection of museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Eiko won a Grammy Award for her artwork for Miles Davis' album Tutu in 1987 and an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. She also received two Tony Award nominations in 1988 for the stage and costume design of the Broadway play M. Butterfly and, in 2012, received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design nomination for Mirror Mirror.[13] In 1992 she was selected to be a member of the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Eiko Ishioka is part of a rare breed of revolutionaries—a woman whose wide-ranging multimedia accomplishments in the late 1960s and 1970s jolted the Japanese cultural establishment. Recognized as Japan's premiere art director and graphic designer, her more recent activities in production and costume design for film, theater, and opera have brought her continued acclaim. Through active participation, self-awareness, and stylishness, her multiple design tactics continue to lead to a scope of assignments for which she has received numerous accolades.

Upon graduating from Tokyo University in the early 1960's, Ishioka entered the advertising division of Shiseido, Japan's oldest and largest cosmetics manufacturer. Here, she broke through a centuries-old stereotype. Instead of promoting the traditional view of Japanese women—quiet and submissive, someone who, according to Ishioka "listens rather than speaks"—she stood firmly behind the idea of using a radically different type of model. "I wanted someone vigorous, with a big body, big expression, big everything, big, big, big." She was given creative leeway to exploit the tensions in Japanese culture between intellect and desire, between innocence and sensuality.

The 1970s were a time of radical change in Japan and Ishioka used the mass media to awaken in her compatriots an awareness of the society's transformation from a traditional culture into a modern global force. In so doing, she changed the landscape of advertising in Japan. At the end of that decade, Ishioka broadened to international projects and found herself observing Japan from the outside. The traditional culture of Japan, which had once been a burden for her, seemed entirely fresh.

Throughout this period, Ishioka revolutionized the poster in Japan, as she was hired as Creative Advertising Director of Parco, a youth-oriented chain of specialty stores that not only provided products, but also created a lifestyle for a rapidly changing culture and society. Her daring, sophisticated designs often made no reference to any actual product sold through Parco. Instead, this liberated woman who is not afraid to be both sensual and sexual in her approach tended to use supple and glistening bodies, torsos lightly dusted with sand, a tuxedoed figure flanked by veiled nudes, provocatively shaped peaches, and partially-clothed models in, what we're made to believe, the throes of ecstasy. "Eroticism," says Ishioka, "is a very important factor in attracting people's souls."

In order to challenge a Western viewer’s ordinary perceptions, Ishioka conceptualized seasonal media campaigns focusing on native women from remote parts of India and Morocco. Her sensitive photographic direction captured their strength, warmth, and beauty. She juxtaposed the images with startling slogans that often seemed to borrow their energy from the world of radical feminism.

As a stage designer, Ishioka's trademark is surrealism with a sensual edge. In 1988, Broadway was doubly blessed—her exotic, opulent designs had been transcribed into the production of M. Butterfly, which earned two Tony Award nominations for scenic design and costume design. That same production earned Ishioka an Outer Critics Circle Award and an American Theater Wing Design Award for Outstanding Theater Design.

Incorporating her designs into film has brought her equal acclaim—the Paul Schrader-directed Mishima, for which Ishioka stylized otherworldly scenery, earned her the award for Artistic Contribution at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985. This year, her flair for the fantastic and intricate will be seen in the newly released Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which director Francis Ford Coppola takes his visual cues not from Boris Karloff but from the paintings of Gustav Klimt. Coppola has called upon Ishioka to visualize Viennese decadence for what he calls "an opera with sex and violence."

Ishioka's style also lends itself to album covers, where she successfully escalates another commercial form to a higher art. For the late legendary jazz horn player, Miles Davis, she visually glorified Davis for his 1987 release Tutu and earned a Grammy Award for best Album Package Design.

Her mode of communication lies more in the realm of the senses than in that of reason. She is not preoccupied with the formal elements of design, although it is obvious that she has total control of them. Ishioka expressed a flair for the dramatic combined with an unwitting sense of humor when she collaborated with famed Japanese designer Issey Miyake. Together, they turned one of his fashion shows into a cross between a Broadway musical and a one-act drama. They charged admission and played to packed houses for six performances.

It is not surprising that this woman, who places no artistic limits on herself, was asked to deliver the keynote speech on "Design Has No Boundaries" at the 1988 International Design Conference in Aspen, The Cutting Edge.

Eiko by Eiko, a book that covers her work from 1970 to the present, is what Ishioka considers a text of creative correspondence addressing Japanese society. This masterpiece of book design and documentation was issued in its second printing in 1990.

"The world is my studio and everything on earth is my motif," says Ishioka of her approach. "In order to help communicate my message, I have looked for talented people in various fields. I have worked with these people to broadcast our messages throughout the media. Television, stage, posters, newspapers, and books have been my canvas, and my collaborators have been most precious paint." It was through these collaborative efforts that Ishioka successfully brought advertising and design to her own "high art."

A diverse collection of her work is included in the permanent collections of museums throughout the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.