Rei Kawakubo Quotes

I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.

I design for myself and the first question I ask is, 'Would I wear it?'

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make - and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn't quite work.

There's always a pattern in order to make a thing, but the starting point must be something I've never seen before. It's not two-dimensional, but it's like a sample. I work with patterns like a sculptor. I try to get [the team] not to work on a body, [but] to work on a free space, on a table. The work is basically on flat surfaces.

This one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration ... I'm a minimalist in a rapper's body.

There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

I get my inspiration from books, pictures, art. I might find a vintage scarf and say, "I think this should be our color palette."

I like that when you create you really do create with a very small group of people, and in that space, before it goes out to all these people, that's what I love.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

I want to emphasize the fact that we all have the same experience and the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly. Once he sees this fact his feet are on the path. If you want to know the truth you will know it. The manipulation of materials in an artwork is a result of this state of mind. The artist works by awareness of his own state of mind.

I went to London a lot as a young designer because London was a major inspiration, not only for the clothes but the sense of freedom. I remember going to see a stage production of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in the mid Eighties and loving the mix of Goth and humor, and in my shows I've always liked to play jokes and have fun.

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

When you design a collection, you have to start with what you love and what you believe in. Unless you do that, you can't stand behind it, so there's no point in doing it.

The first thing we do is sit around a table and discuss what we could pick up from daily life, from space. That's how it starts, completely abstract. There's no kind of, "Oh, let's do Peru," or "Let's do pleats," you know?

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

I love to design for women, it's really open and very free. I always think of my friends. I think of both fictitious characters, real people from the past and the present. I am not a woman, but I find women so beautiful and so fascinating.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

I know a famous violinist who told me he can't compose because he knows too many pieces. So, when he starts thinking of a note, an existing piece immediately comes to mind. Just starting out, one of your biggest strengths is not knowing how things are supposed to be.

With men, you need to anticipate all your ideas at least one or two months before the next women's collection, so you need to create a feeling that links with what will happen a few months later. To me, a man and a woman are really a couple. They live together. They grew up in Italy together. So, not just in the stores or the campaigns, but also in real life, it's very important for me to create a connection between them.

I would prefer to use the word free. I think the Dior thing is so much freer. There was not so much free about Jil's way of working.

Everything I do with BLK DNM is more personal than anything I have done before. I've worked hard to go deeper in my true intuition, and therefore I am definitely more pure in my personal taste than ever.

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.