Issey Miyake's Quotes

By the way, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14.

Design is not for philosophy it's for life.

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand.

I have worked with several dance companies.

I sent 200, 300 of the clothes that I had made, and the dancers chose what they liked.

I very much like dance and dancers.

Well, what I'm doing is really clothing. I'm not doing sculpture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.