“Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation,”

I’d really like to be in closer contact with life. I’m a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.

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.

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.

Elegance and beauty have been banished.

I love bows, … And I feel some couture pots coming on.

I created for my era and I tried to foresee what tomorrow would be.

Fashion comes and goes, but style is eternal.

I adore America. It’s an extraordinary country. A new country.

Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic.

When you feel good in a clothing anything can happen.

Dressing is a way of life.

A good clothing is a passport for happiness.

A good model can advance fashion by ten years.

I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.