“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.”

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.

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

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

I always want to wear clothes that my children will one day look back on and say, ‘Oh, you looked amazing – why didn’t you keep that?’ Not, ‘Oh my God – I can’t believe you wore that.’

My mom modeled and made clothes, so I always had such an appreciation for design.

When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

I don’t like to spend a lot of money on designer clothes, but I do like to look good.

I don’t see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes.

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.