Science & Tech Quote by Issey Miyake

In a single line, Issey Miyake sketches his whole design ethic: the future is only worth chasing if it still remembers the body. The phrase "even when" admits the obvious seduction of high technology while refusing its usual promise of clean, frictionless perfection. Miyake is telling you that machines can manufacture speed, precision, and scale, but they cannot manufacture intimacy. That has to be authored.

"Touch of the hand" is more than craft nostalgia. It is a claim about where meaning lives in clothing: in the slight irregularities, the responsive drape, the human decision-making embedded in a seam or a pleat. Miyake's work has always treated fabric like architecture that moves, and his most celebrated innovations - think Pleats Please and A-POC (a digitally driven, tube-of-cloth concept) - are proof he isn't anti-tech. He's anti-sterile. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to an industry that confuses innovation with novelty and equates automation with inevitability.

Context matters: Miyake comes out of postwar Japan, where modernity arrived as both miracle and trauma, and where the relationship between artisan tradition and industrial prowess was never theoretical. His design language bridges those worlds: technology as tool, not author; efficiency as a means to preserve freedom of movement, not to erase the maker. In 2026, with AI-generated aesthetics and hyper-optimized supply chains, the line reads like a warning label: if you remove the hand, you don't just lose craftsmanship - you lose the human point of view.