A biography for Issey Miyakehasn’t been written yet.
“I'd rather look to the future than to the past.”
“I do not create a fashionable aesthetic... I create a style based on life.”
“My design is no design.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Paris is an old and traditional place; it needs new blood.”
“When I first began working in Japan, I had to confront the Japanese people's excessive worship for foreign goods and the fixed idea of what clothes ought to be. I wanted to change the rigid formula of clothing that the Japanese followed.”
“If you look back throughout history from the ancient Egyptians onwards, most cultures started making clothing from a very basic premise: a single piece of cloth.”
“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.”
“I realised I wanted to make clothing which was as universal as jeans and T-shirts.”
“Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues.”
“Clothing has been called intimate architecture. We want to go beyond that.”
“Well, what I'm doing is really clothing. I'm not doing sculpture.”
“In Paris, we call the people who make clothing 'couturiers' - they develop new clothing items - but actually, the work of designing is to make something that works in real life.”
“All of my work stems from the simplest of ideas that go back to the earliest civilizations: making clothing from one piece of cloth. It is my touchstone.”
“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.”
“Retire? Never! We are far too busy!”
“Everything is an experiment.”
“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.”
“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.”