Tariq Ali Quotes

Teenage girls like certain things I wear - or certainly did when that whole boho thing happened.

Edie Sedgwick had a cool style; she pushed the envelope for the time.

In the early Seventies, I had shoulder-length hair, bell-bottom pants, love beads and shirts that laced up at the front. But then I smartened up.

I wanted to go out of fashion, to study medicine. I thought, you know, who needs fashion? How important is it if you wear a red dress and an orange jacket? It's not, really.

I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people.

How I dressed in high school is the way we dressed.

I think that British girls have a very eclectic and unique style.

The reason we all need a mutton alert, which needs constant testing, like smoke alarms, is because there is really no such thing as age-appropriate dressing any longer, as I know because my wardrobe is interchangeable with my daughter's.

You can go into neighborhoods in the United States where people dress a certain way because they don't want to be out of touch, where boys wear pants down to their knees, which nobody has compelled them to do but they pick up the cultural norms, or where girls are improperly dressed by my eyes, but that's what they see in the media.

I've always felt like a designer of lifestyle that has a certain spirit and bohemian quality.

As a teenager, I used to dress up like a hippie. My clothes weren't posh.

My place in design history is to sort of interpret youth culture, and I think we've seen that done in fashion before - it's not a new concept - but it hasn't been done with the same vigour in a modern context.

Fashion and music are two great artistic forms that can be molded by the youth culture - our taste and our passion for evolving things in our limited time on earth allows us to look at things with fresh eyes.

I look at culture, and I see what the kids around me are wearing, and I see a particular style. I understand the space between fashion and streetwear.

I love how pop culture shapes a generation. The trends, fashion and events all play a key part in how we live our present lives, and will mark how we will be remembered in the future.

I saw young women in the street dressing in a way that I thought was influencing the designers. Fashion was being influenced by all sorts of different people, and culture and also across the street. So I saw more as a trickle up, than a trickle down influence. When I came to Vogue, that's what I wanted it to reflect.

In the early-'60s, when you look at that period of time - up to the mod time - when everybody was wearing skinnier suits and skinny lapels and skinny ties - that came out of the States, and that was quite cool.

My mother had heard all about miniskirts but had never seen one so I took her for lunch at Alvaro's [in Chelsea]. We walked down the King's Road and waited 10 seconds for our first miniskirt and a girl came along with her skirt tucked round her arse. I said: 'What do you think, ma?' And she said: 'If it's not for sale, you shouldn't put it in the window!'

There's just something about that late '80s that suddenly feels like it has something to teach us.

Who you going to tell when the repercussions spin, showing off your ass because you think it's a trend.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

Youth culture adopts Armani and adapts it in its own way, as befits youthful enthusiasm.

1961 was when I was really into clothes. I left school at 15 and started copying a bloke who used to go up on the train to London with me; Leslie, I think his name was. He was like, top mod of his own area. He wore Italian jackets with white linen jeans. Boy, was that cool! I mean, that's in style now - it's very much the L.A. look. But he was wearing it then, and it looked supercool.

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

If you had two pair of jeans, four shirts, you were cool if you had a couple pair of kicks that were fresh. That was it. That's how it started.