Phillip Lim Quotes

Art has definitely influenced how I think of design, both as individual items and as a body of work.

I love every period in design history. Even the ugly ones.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

When I design, I think about the desire someone might have for it and why. I want them to fall in love with it.

Design has always been a driving force in my life: it's the lens through which I experience the world.

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.

When any great design thou dost intend, Think on the means, the manner, and the end.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad.

Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop.

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

This is one of my big things of creative pursuits. You have your idea you want to do, but then you got to figure out what does this thing want to be? You got to let it lead you a little.

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.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.

Design is a thinking process that starts in the head and with sketches. Thinking cannot be done by a computer.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea.

All creative work begins by doing something with the hands. Creation is simply a problem and design is the way out.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

My process started when I was born. The process is life experience. I believe that what makes you an artist, or at least an artist who can communicate the ideas that they want to get across, are people that have life experience.

There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.

When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you