You may not know the name of the award-winning Japanese artist and costume designer Eiko Ishioka, the subject of Wednesday’s Google Doodle, but you probably know her work.
Eiko Ishioka was the iconic costume designer behind Dracula, The Fall, and the Beijing Olympics
Wednesday’s Google Doodle honors the convention-defying Japanese artist on what would have been her 79th birthday.
The artist, who died in 2012 but would have turned 79 today, is known for her surrealist approach to costuming, artistic direction, and graphic design, often blending the dark and unsettling into a dramatic aesthetic. Her striking, haunting tone earned her a Grammy Award (for art-directing the album art for Miles Davis’s Tutu), an Oscar (for the costumes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula), and three Tony nominations (for her work on 1988’s M. Butterfly and 2012’s Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark) over the course of her decades-long career.
Born July 12, 1938, in Tokyo to a graphic designer and a homemaker, Ishioka was a visual storyteller who took after her father’s profession and her mother’s forsaken creative endeavors. Graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1961, Ishioka entered the male-dominated industry of advertising. Despite warnings about potential hurdles to employment, she dug in her heels and proved herself as a bold, avant-garde conceptualist.
She initially became known for devising print ad campaigns featuring naked or nearly naked models — the likes of which were rarely seen in her industry at the time.
“To make a good ad, you have to approach people’s minds and bodies,” she once said.
“That was extremely shocking,” Maggie Kinser Saiki, the author of 12 Japanese Masters, told the Philippine Star about Ishioka’s work. “And yet she did it in a way that made you drawn to the beauty of it, and then you realize you’re looking at nipples.”
Ishioka began doing costuming work for Broadway and Hollywood starting in the early 1980s. Later in the decade, her passion for high-contrast coloring and minimalist focus (with a heavy emphasis on profiling the body) led her to conceive of the album art for Miles Davis’s Tutu, for which she would win a Grammy in 1986.
In 1992, her artistic fixation on the physical form helped her create the striking costumes for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, including star Gary Oldman’s blood-red and muscle-like suit of body armor. Ishioka’s work on the film earned her an Oscar for costume design.
Not all of Ishioka’s creations earned such industry plaudits, but many of them were memorable nonetheless — including her direction of Bjork’s 2001 music video “Cocoon,” and her costume design for Cirque du Soleil, the 2006 film The Fall (which is the main focus of her Google Doodle), and the 2010 Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
Ishioka’s costumes are characterized by unusual geometric shapes and vibrant colors. And she did not restrict her work to the stage and screen. Twice, for example, she ventured into the Olympic arena: At the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, she designed uniforms and outerwear for the Swiss, Canadian, Spanish, and Japanese teams, in addition to creating the Concentration Coat — a womblike cocoon meant to help athletes meditate and free themselves of distractions before competition. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, she took on a much larger role: art-directing the optically and physically staggering opening ceremony. The Guardian called the event “spellbinding,” while Yahoo proclaimed that Beijing “set the bar for Olympic opening ceremony standards.”
Ishioka’s contributions to the Olympics and the worlds of advertising, music, theater, and film span continents, cultures, mediums, and decades. And it’s all of these things that help her boundary-breaking work remain unmatched.
