I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it’s worth I did it.
I was born with a nervous breakdown.
For me, perfume, must be adapted to fashion, not the other way around.
I don’t at all search for an ideal woman, but several ideal women.
I adore America. It’s an extraordinary country. A new country.
I cannot pretend to do sculpture and make a woman the ridiculous pedestal of my pretensions. To render clothing poetic, yes – but one must preserve its dignity as clothing.
Each model I have represents a type of ideal women to me.
I don’t really like knees.
I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.
Anyone who reaches for great expression has to be careful of the ridiculous.
Fashion is defined by what later becomes out of fashion.
Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!
I couldn’t love a woman who inspired me to be totally disinterested. If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something.
I love women. I love all the bright and attractive people and things of this world, the flame and also the moth, the dancer and the dance.
Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic by fashion.
I tried to show that fashion is an art. For that, I followed the counsel of my master Christian Dior and the imperishable lesson of Mademoiselle Chanel. I created for my era and I tried to foresee what tomorrow would be.
I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.
A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.
Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.
There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion and if I hadn’t shown them I would never have arrived at this point in fashion, you see.