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

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.

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.

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.

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.