"Issey Miyake Making Things," Miyake's current offering, presents the master in three different aspects. Broadly speaking, of course, sculpture, painting and fashion design are related, but no one else has such ability to convince us that these three arts can be made one.

The exhibition, which debuted at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris in 1998 and moved on to the Ace Gallery in New York a year later, arrives in Japan as the first public presentation in Japan in 2000 by Miyake, arguably Asia's most influential designer.

The emphasis, naturally, is heavily on Miyake as designer. It is we who become the "clothes makers," for Miyake holds that a square of textile is only a piece of cloth; the wearer brings it to life and adds the final details.

When one thinks of Miyake one naturally thinks of pleats, and indeed that particular era in Miyake's career gets star treatment. Several years ago, as fashion columnist for this newspaper at the time of the emergence of the Pleats Please line, I wrote that certain pieces were works of art and as such were museum pieces. Now, a decade later, they have found their true home in the Museum of Contemporary Art.

A case in point is the Origami series, some of Miyake's earliest pleated pieces, dating from the late '80s. To some, they might seem to have been wadded and stuffed in a suitcase and forgotten for 10 years. To others they are indeed works of art and it is, as Miyake intended, the wearer who gives them life: Each movement of the body translates into movement in each pleat.

Of special interest then is the section devoted to this "fashion as art" -- a kinetic carnival of pieces each with an exquisite name like Nomad, Zig-Zag, Minaret or Baobab, dancing before your eyes. What hangs and moves before us is exactly what Miyake wanted to achieve: a fusion of fabric and movement which stimulates both wearer and observer alike.

One can't help but smile at the cartoon at the beginning of the exhibition catalog. Taken from the New Yorker magazine, it shows a formally dressed man at a gallery reception inquiring of a woman in a pleated number, "Are you in a Miyake or did you just sleep in your dress?"

At "Making Things" the spotlight naturally remains on Miyake, but he has generously given some space to four artists who present their own interpretations: Cai Guoqiang's 1998 work, "Dragon," in which gunpowder has seared patterns on a pile of pleated clothes, Yasumasa Morimura's and Nobuyoshi Araki's self-portraits, and Tim Hawkinson's abstract "The Pneumatic Quilt."

The video room has a 10-minute video in which clips from the Paris collections between 1989-1999 are shown, including lots of pleated pieces.

Miyake's customers, like any others, are fickle and demand change. If we look back on the Pleats Please series as a defining point in Miyake's almost four decades in fashion, we see too that it was just one event (though one of tremendous importance) in a life of achievement.

Of more immediate import is the future. Here, Miyake heads off in two directions. One is Just Before and A-POC, in which clothes are mass-produced with minimal waste. The other is Starburst, which involves recycling.

Just Before, in this case, is a huge coil of black knitted jersey fabric which is spewing out dress after dress. Towering on the museum floor, the coil has been produced by a computer-programmed industrial knitting machine. Next to it is a related theme, A-POC (a piece of cloth): Suspended from a long metal pipe high above the floor, columns of tube dresses descend to clothe mannequins in scarlet fabric.

One of the fun things about this new direction is that the customer can actually go to the boutique, pick up a pair of scissors and cut his or her own clothes directly from the roll of fabric. Try this yourself at the A-POC store in Tokyo's Aoyama!

The second timely direction is the recycling of used garments. In Starburst, old clothes -- a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a cotton jacket -- are given a new lease of life: Thin copper, gold or silver foil is pressed onto pieces using thermocompression bonding. When the foil is torn, fragmented light forms random patterns; a new texture and expression is born.

In this display the walls are covered with corrugated paper. Through it, you can make out the shapes of various garments awaiting their "birth." Move your eyes a couple of meters further on, or up or down, and you'll find a shirt or a blouson, half in, half out, sparkling in the new life that has been bestowed upon it.

Perhaps you can compare Miyake's life to a river, starting small and uncertain, but in time growing bigger and stronger and becoming something very significant. Along the way stepping stones appear: exhibitions like "Bodyworks" (1983-85), "A Un" (1988), "Pleats Please" (1990) and "Twist" (1992) -- islands linking together different stages of development.

Now the stream has grown into a river, and the stepping stones are replaced by a bridge. With "Making Things" we enter the 21st century, following Miyake in his quest to understand the relationship between clothing and the human form.