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Sneak Peek: Eiko Ishioka Papers at UCLA Library Special Collections

By Melissa Haley

UCLA Library Special Collections has acquired the archive of the multi-talented designer Eiko Ishioka, which is currently being processed.

Ishioka (1938-2012) attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and started her career in the 1960s in the male-dominated world of Japanese advertising, designing many campaigns for the cosmetics giant Shiseido. She founded her own firm in 1970 and soon diversified her design work by adding books, journals and magazine articles, record albums, and product packaging to her repertoire, as well as serving as director of several Issey Miyake fashion shows. Ishioka also created numerous advertising campaigns for major clients like the Japanese department store Parco throughout the decade.

Ishioka continued to branch out as her career progressed and she spent the remaining decades of it primarily designing sets and costumes for theater, film, opera, magic shows, and individual performers; creating art and photography exhibitions; continuing with occasional advertising work; and even designing sports uniforms for Olympic athletes and the Houston Rockets basketball team. Some of her major stage credits include the Broadway productions M. Butterfly (1988), David Copperfield’s Dreams & Nightmares (1996), and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2010); the Nederlander Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1997-1998); Cirque du Soliel’s Varekai (2002-); and singer Grace Jones’ Hurricane Tour (2009). She designed costumes for a number of films including The Cell (2000), The Fall (2006), and Mirror Mirror (2012) (all directed by Tarsem Singh) and for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which garnered her an Oscar win.

Sorting poster duplicates.

Highlights from the Collection

The material in the collection relates to nearly every aspect of Ishioka’s multi-faceted career in addition to her early artwork and school projects. Around 800 boxes of diverse shapes and sizes arrived at UCLA Library Special Collections on several shipping palettes. As the processing archivist on this collection, I have had to identify, sort, and find appropriate housing for costume drawings and sketches, fabric samples, architectural drawings of set designs, hundreds of posters (including oversized movie posters), and various other material relating to her numerous projects including correspondence, scripts, production photographs, programs, clippings, and ephemera. The collection also contains photographs (everything from framed exhibition photos to snapshots), slides, and negatives, as well as audiovisual material such as film (35 mm, 16 mm, Super 8), multiple formats of video, record albums, cassettes and microcassettes. Objects like original product packaging, awards, and art supplies are also present. And finally, the collection contains Ishioka’s voluminous library of art and other books, which will be individually cataloged.

Loose snapshots: look closely and you will  find Grace Jones, Toshiro Mifune, Faye Dunaway, and Francis Ford Coppola.
 

The collection will be open for research this year, so look for the Eiko Ishioka papers (Collection 2288) finding aid on the UCLA Library Special Collections’ Online Archive of California (OAC) page.

Meanwhile check out last year's Google Doodle honoring Eiko Ishioka's 79th birthday!

 

Melissa Haley is a Processing Archivist at UCLA Library Special Collections. She previously worked at the New York Public Library, New York University, and The New-York Historical Society.

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