Science & Tech Quote by Issey Miyake

There’s a sly humility in Miyake’s setup: an “assistant found” an “old German machine,” as if innovation arrives by accident, scavenged from the industrial attic rather than commissioned in a glossy lab. But the modesty is strategic. He’s reframing fashion progress as reuse, not rupture, and he’s doing it with the most unglamorous origin story possible: underwear manufacturing. The point isn’t nostalgia; it’s a values statement about where modern design should come from.

The underwear detail works because it drags haute fashion back to the body’s basics. Underwear is intimate, functional, repetitive, engineered for stretch and comfort. By invoking it, Miyake hints at his own obsession with clothes as technology for living, not costume for status. The Chanel comparison sharpens the argument: great houses aren’t born from “luxury” materials, but from smart redeployments of ordinary ones (jersey was once workwear, not myth). Miyake is placing himself in that lineage while quietly revising it: the hero isn’t the genius sketch, it’s the machine and the material process.

“Make something else” is the quiet manifesto. It’s about mutation: taking a tool designed for one purpose and forcing it to speak a new language. In a culture that fetishizes novelty, Miyake suggests the future is hiding in existing infrastructure, waiting for a designer to reroute it. Subtext: originality is often just a better use of what’s already been made.