Rei Kawakubo Quotes

I love designing costumes that I can actually construct, working to create an environment that people want to be in.

I first met Michael Angel when he came to my office with a box of prints and asked me whether I thought he should make dresses from the prints.

I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the pictures.

Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue.

I make clothes; women make fashion.

I love the journeys of research and discovery their development takes me on. I see prints as less 'decorative' than many might, and more fundamental to a garment's core.

I would just sketch everything that was being made for the collections.

A dress is an emotional thing to make. You've got to fall in love with it and not just with the dress - the whole process of designing it has to be a good experience.

I would like to sit down with Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, PJ Harvey, and Bjork. That would be a good dinner in my mind. Strong women. I think I would enjoy that.

My process of songwriting comes from a very real place: a place that when you watch 'American Idol' - God bless it, it's probably an awesome experience that these people are having, but it's not a real one.

I like to take my time when I'm designing and constructing outfits.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

Throw away those little pieces of paper. Get yourself a big, beautiful canvas. Bring from this nature the most beautiful colors. Find the serene scene within. Find the joy in each corner of your life. Sit still and feel what is within you. Sit still and paint like you have never painted before.

I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately upon returning from them. I must wait for a time to draw a veil over the common details.

I feel such a creative force in me: I am convinced that there will be a time when, let us say, I will make something good every day , on a regular basis....I am doing my very best to make every effort because I am longing so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things mean painstaking work, disappointment, and perseverance.

Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run

Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain.

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

To have the ability to withdraw into oneself and forget everything around one when one is creating - What, I think is the only requirement for being able to bring forth something beautiful. The whole thing is - a mystery.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Sweaters need to be imagined, dreamed over.

A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.