Vivienne Westwood Quotes

Personally, I have had sometimes moments where I thought my idea behind the idea of a collection - the concept maybe - something that we don't see at the end on the catwalk, I think the way it was, the genesis in my mind, was probably artistic, an artistic approach.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.

I drape a lot. I cut. I have to touch. For me, it's almost impossible to start without that.

I love the idea of couture and its emphasis on creation. There's where I made my name - in design - and there's where I'd like to stay.

Truthfully, the hardest part about fashion is not the vision or one great idea, but the execution of each aspect.

The dynamics of film directing and fashion design - in the ways that I've done it - were not dissimilar.

The most significant pieces for me are the ones that come from my drapings. It's emotional because they are created by my hand and then become a collaborative process in the atelier.

The big difference between couture and ready-to-wear is not design. It is the fabrics, the handwork, and the fittings. The act of creation is the same.

Some people have a concept of design: that it should be without the maker. I have been educated in this way, the traditional way. But I am not naive. I know that we make my things, and that people want them. I am signing them - and I am winking at them.

Balenciaga taught me everything I know. He taught me to care for the details, that it was not necessary to sew on a button where it had no use or to add a flower to make a dress beautiful... no unnecessary detail.

A couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance.

I only do what I do. For me, it is a craft. It's got to be my own thing - otherwise, I would never be successful. I could easily go to the archives and pull 1987 or 1991 collection by Calvin Klein. But when you look in there, you realize that it was never about one piece. It was about the collections as bodies of work.

I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

Simple and intuitive design is what inspires and drives me.

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.

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Some days I have a knot in my stomach because I've got to sit down and come up with something in womenswear that no one else came up with.

I don't think about making sexy clothes. It's just my instinct to make them.

As a composer I approached the drums differently than a non-composing drummer. I embraced drum machines.

You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this.