Rei Kawakubo Quotes

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

The most powerful part of the art is experiential, yet it's the hardest to describe because it's nonverbal.

It's always a fantastic moment for me when someone wears one of our designs.

The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

It's often said that costume designers are a faceless group of people. But we can contribute to fashion in a way that might be new and different.

I'm a designer, and I think if you work in fashion, you have to give people fantasy.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

To put what you see on paper is the same as funneling what you feel through yourself as a performer.

Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

I can't design anything unless I'm excited by it, meaning I have an urge to wear it.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

I think the sensation of being moved by a piece of art is something that is really good for a person's soul.

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

The key to good art is to make something that means something to you.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.