Daily Inspiration Quote by Issey Miyake

Name-dropping Marilyn Monroe isn’t nostalgia here; it’s a scalpel aimed at fashion’s most profitable lie: that beauty comes in a single, shrinking number. When Issey Miyake drops the line “By the way,” he frames it like a casual aside, the kind of fact you toss out to end an argument. That offhand tone is the point. It exposes how flimsy the industry’s “ideal” really is if one inconvenient detail about its most canonized sex symbol can puncture it.

The size 14 claim functions less as trivia than as a corrective myth. Monroe has been endlessly repackaged as the patron saint of voluptuousness and “real” curves, but she’s also been airbrushed into a pin-up whose body conveniently fits whatever decade’s standards demand. Miyake’s invocation drags her back into material reality: clothing sizes, measurements, bodies that occupy space. It’s also a quiet critique of how sizing itself is a moving target; a “14” isn’t a natural fact so much as a cultural artifact, varying by era, brand, and country. That instability underlines his larger argument: the numbers are arbitrary, the shame is engineered.

Coming from a designer known for rethinking how fabric meets the body (pleats that move, garments that accommodate), the line reads like an ethical design brief. Don’t worship the mannequin. Build for humans. The subtext is blunt: if you’re using Monroe to sell fantasy, at least stop pretending the fantasy is small.