“I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.”

We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.

I’m so secluded. Very alone.

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.

Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don’t burn your wings.

Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.

The street and me is a love story. 1971 is a great date because, finally, fashion took to the street.

There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion.

Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

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.

For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not 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 am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style.

I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity – all I hope for in my clothes.

I don’t at all search for an ideal woman, but several ideal women.

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.

I prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?

I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it’s all we need.

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern.

A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It’s the most abstract of all art expression.