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

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

I prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.

The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.

What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

If, in ready-to-wear, a garment is manufactured according to standard sizes, the haute couture garment adapts to any imperfection in order to eliminate it.

Fashion is like a party. Getting dressed is preparing to play a role.

Anyone who reaches for great expression has to be careful of the ridiculous.

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.

A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months.

I have always believed that fashion was not only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.

I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.

My name will be written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysees.

Each model I have represents a type of ideal women to me.

For me, perfume, must be adapted to fashion, not the other way around.

Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime. Mais, pour celles qui n’ont pas eu la chance de trouver ce bonheur, je suis là.

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.

The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house.

No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.