“I prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.”

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 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.

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

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.

I’d rather be David Ladd’s father than Alan Ladd any day.

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.

That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials — they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think — rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

One has to use words to make headings, that’s all it is. It’s rather like the stupidity in a picture gallery today where you have to write under it what the scene or person is. It is equally as nonsensical as that.

We can’t defend the country by looking at the borderline as the first line of defense rather than as the last line of defense.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.