“To be beautiful, woman enough to have a black sweater, black skirt and walk arm in arm with the man she loves.”

[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.

Fashions fade, style is eternal.

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.

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman’s jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with.

We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.

One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress.

We all tend to be in the same circles – people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.