Many people repeat the past. I’m not interested. I prefer evolution.
Issey Miyake
I do not create a fashionable aesthetic… I create a style based on life.
Issey Miyake
When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape – I remember it all.
Issey Miyake
The purpose – where I start – is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it’s reuse.
Issey Miyake
We yearn for the beautiful, the unknown, and the mysterious.
Issey Miyake
I love to be free to explore, research, and evolve.
Issey Miyake
I did not want to be labelled ‘the designer who survived the atomic bomb,’ and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima.
Issey Miyake
There are no boundaries for what can be fabric.
Issey Miyake
Of course there are many ways we can reuse something. We can dye it. We can cut it. We can change the buttons. Those are other ways to make it alive. But this is a new step to use anything – hats, socks, shirts. It’s the first step in the process.
Issey Miyake
With imagination and personal creativity, people who sew can design the way they look to suit themselves.
Issey Miyake
I suppose there are many, but I cannot imagine ever having a more perfect collaboration than that which Penn-san and I shared. It was based upon mutual trust, respect, and a desire to have our own work pushed to new places. And it always resulted in delight.
Issey Miyake
I realised I wanted to make clothing which was as universal as jeans and T-shirts.
Issey Miyake
I always wanted to create clothing that was universal – easy to wear, to care for, and that was also beautiful. As such, I became interested in polyester, and its potential, from the beginning of my career.
Issey Miyake
In the Eighties, Japanese fashion designers brought a new type of creativity; they brought something Europe didn’t have. There was a bit of a shock effect, but it probably helped the Europeans wake up to a new value.
Issey Miyake
I started to work with cotton fabrics. I used cotton because it’s easy to work with, to wash, to take care of, to wear if it’s warm or cold. It’s great. That was the start.
Issey Miyake
I try to be free. The women also must be free.
Issey Miyake
One of my assistants found this old German machine. It was originally used to make underwear. Like Chanel, who started with underwear fabric – jerseys – we used the machine that made underwear to make something else.
Issey Miyake
By the way, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14.
Issey Miyake
We have to keep a very tight check on quality.
Issey Miyake
A-POC respects that there is a fine balance between the value of the human touch, which can be called artisanal, and the abilities of technology. I like to think of it as poesy and technology.
Issey Miyake
Our goals must be to find new, environmentally-friendly ways by which to continue the art of creation, to utilize our valuable human skills, and to make things that will bring joy.
Issey Miyake
Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes – and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s.
Issey Miyake
Indian paper is famous, Egyptian papyrus, Chinese paper… every country has used this natural material. But the problem is it’s going to run out because it’s very difficult work.
Issey Miyake
Retire? Never! We are far too busy!
Issey Miyake
The future of fashion is light, durable clothes.
Issey Miyake
Designers must be increasingly sensitive to our Earth’s dwindling resources. It is our responsibility.
Issey Miyake
Many people will say, well, clothes should be worn; but I think people can look at them in public, like seeing a film. I think museum exhibitions are very important.
Issey Miyake
I make clothing, and I don’t care about trendy things.
Issey Miyake
If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima – whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred – it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat.
Issey Miyake
You see it in the many bouncing clothes that are not just pleats. To make them, two or three people twist them – twist, twist, twist the pleats, sometimes three or four persons twist together and put it all in the machine to cook it.
Issey Miyake
Well, what I’m doing is really clothing. I’m not doing sculpture.
Issey Miyake
We can also cut by heat – heat punch. And we also can cut by cold – extreme cold. When you cut with heat, it makes a mark. With cold, no mark. It depends on the fabric.
Issey Miyake
To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first – if you’re not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines – ones that are no longer used.
Issey Miyake
I very much like dance and dancers.
Issey Miyake
I sent 200, 300 of the clothes that I had made, and the dancers chose what they liked.
Issey Miyake
I have worked with several dance companies.
Issey Miyake
From the beginning I thought about working with the body in movement, the space between the body and clothes. I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh.
Issey Miyake
Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand.
Issey Miyake
A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.
Issey Miyake
Design is not for philosophy it’s for life.
Issey Miyake
Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues.
Issey Miyake
I’ve never been involved in any kind of political movement.
Issey Miyake
I was always interested in making clothing that is worn by people in the real world.
Issey Miyake
Indian clothes are usually tight.
Issey Miyake
I respect men and women who age and are proud and don’t lose energy. I think fashion forgot those people.
Issey Miyake
Paris is an old and traditional place; it needs new blood.
Issey Miyake
The joining of the Japanese with the French should make a new movement. I think it should be good for Paris.
Issey Miyake
My design is no design.
Issey Miyake
I’d rather look to the future than to the past.
Issey Miyake
I am not really interested in clothing as a conceptual art form.
Issey Miyake
In the past, art was admired and revered from afar. Today, there is more of an interactive relationship between the art and the person who admires it.
Issey Miyake
My generation in Japan lived in limbo. We dreamed between two worlds.
Issey Miyake