“For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion.”

Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!

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.

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.

I don’t really like knees.

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.

Moda je prolazna, dok stil traje, on je večan.

I want to thank all the women who have worn my clothes, the famous and the unknown, who have been so faithful to me and given me so much joy.

Chanel freed women, and I empowered them.

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.

Decadence attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society’s struggle between life and death is absolutely beautiful.

I was born with a nervous breakdown.

Finding your own style is not easy, but once found it brings complete happiness. It gives you self-confidence, always.

Fashions come and go, but style is forever.

Fashion is defined by what later becomes out of fashion.

Without elegance of the heart, there is no elegance.

Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation,

The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

I write these shows one joke at a time. There’s no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there’s not continuity.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.

Indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.