Little wonder, really, that Issey Miyake was Steve Jobs’s favorite designer. The man behind Mr. Jobs’s personal uniform of black mock turtlenecks, who died on Aug. 5 at age 84 , was a pioneer in all sorts of ways — the first foreign designer to show at Paris Fashion Week (in April 1974), among the first designers to collaborate with artists and a proponent of “comfort dressing” long before the term ever existed. But it was his understanding and appreciation of technology and how it could be harnessed to an aesthetic point of view to create new, seductive utilities that set Mr. Miyake apart. Before there were wearables, before there were connected jackets, before there were 3-D-printed sneakers and laser-cut lace, there was Mr. Miyake, pushing the boundaries of material innovation to bridge past and future. He was the original champion of fashion tech. It began in 1988 with Mr. Miyake’s research into the heat press, and how it could be used to create garments that started as fabric two or three times larger than normal, which was then pressed between two sheets of paper and fed into an industrial machine that shaped it into knife-edge pleats, which in turn…