Alex Kapranos Quotes

Whenever I see a girl in tie dye twirling, I'll say yes. I've arrived. I'm in the right place.

I had begun to abandon bourgeois style of dress. The modern hippies are no pioneers at marking themselves out by unusual apparel …

We want people to know they shouldn't feel like social pariahs just because they want to dress differently or listen to rock n' roll.

In the Seventies and Eighties we all had our fun, and now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a certain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to be accepted as a freak.

I am a theater girl, and a lot of theater girls dress however pleases them. I wear whatever looks good on me. I wear what I wear because I have been shopping at thrift stores since I was five.

I used to skip school and paint my face with Ace Frehley Kiss make-up.

The first things I did when I got out of school in '65 was to buy a pair of Levis and pierce my ears.

I've had watermelon hair where I had pink with green tips. From the age of 13 to about 19 or 20, I never had my real hair color.

I always had influences musically with punk, and then growing up, I dyed my hair every color. I did the dip-dye blue, before anybody was dip-dyeing their hair. And streaks of pinks and purples and whatnot.

When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

Growing up in Seattle, I was always that kid who didn't subscribe to what everyone else was wearing.

For me, hipsterism is for one to appropriate the codes of a social class or another milieu that wasn't theirs originally, in order to define their personality through something different and unique. Which is why a lot of hipsters live downtown, and they're dressed as farmers. Then you have the Oscar Wilde hipster: the dandy.

Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing.

My first day of high school, I wore brown boys' corduroys that my mom had sewn Sesame Street elastic into - they were my coolest pants - and a lime green Patagonia fleece that my mom found at Goodwill. I loved fleece.

I grew up in the Bible Belt and I made my own clothes and dyed my hair purple. Nobody ever knew what to do with me.

I was never really a Mod. I thought I was more of a beatnik with the brown corduroy jacket, blue jeans, etc. I loved the music Mods liked, and I loved the clothes, but I didn't have any money to spend on them.

I mean, I'm pretty good in real life, but sometimes people seem surprised that I'm like a normal teenager and wear black nail polish and I'm just a little bit more edgy than the person I play on television.

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.

I used to live in a gap jumper, tracksuit bottoms and a fake flower in my hair. Shocking.

I am a bit of a bad boy. I have tattoos and I mess around. That's part of my image, so it's cool.

They are called 'Emos' now, and before that they were 'Goths.' They didn't have a name for it when I was one, but I was that black-wearing teenager and yes, I wore a little eyeliner.

When the Beatles first came out, you had to go to a certain amount of trouble to have long hair. You just couldn't have it immediately. Anything you can just go out and get - like platform shoes - is not going to inspire people as much as something they have to go through a little bit of hell to have.

The first thing I bought that was really stylish was in 1969 when I was eleven. I saved up for a black, grey and white tie-dye grandad vest. It was too big - they weren't catering for kids my age - and hung off me, but I loved it.

My whole life is punk.