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.
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.
I am a clothes maker, and that's all I am. I only want to talk about the making of the clothes. I don't feel the need to go out there and explain that.
Alexander McQueen's heartbreakingly premature death, at the height of his creativity and influence, has robbed the fashion world of a soaring and unique talent.
Working for incredible talents like Balenciaga and Antonio Castillo, I learned about the immense skill and creativity involved in couture work.
You work around a body and adapt the clothes to your own customer, and this is the interesting part. This is why the haute couture exists: because in ready-to-wear, you have not too much fitting.
I am very happy to design haute couture. It's a love story between couture and me.
With McQueen you have so much at your fingertips. That is what's so incredible about this place. Lee built an amazing house, an English house - and that is very important - where creativity rules, where you can do whatever you want to do for the shows because no one's saying: where's your basic dress, where's your three button jacket?
I work in fashion because the world is such a heavy place that I need to be in this industry that fights for five hours to get a dress.
I don't think couture will die. But it should have no pretension that it will conquer the world. It's not something that will disappear because all you need is a thread and a needle to start making something couture.
When it comes to Project Runway, for me the most memorable look ever presented goes back to season one, episode one, when Austin Scarlett created a ravishing cocktail dress out of cornhusks. It was really amazing.
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
