Textile Manipulation Quotes

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.

Very few designers today design - it's very important to be able to do your own sketch on paper and then explain [your vision] to the fabric cutters. Instead, lots of designers drape - it's the new way.

When we put the antlers on the model and then draped over it the lace embroidery that we had made, we had to poke them through a £2,000 piece of work. But then it worked because it looks like she's rammed the piece of lace with her antlers. There's always spontaneity. You've got to allow for that in my shows.

A lot of fashion might seem boring, but it is actually quite fun: the inside, the outside, the silhouette... All the different finishes. That's a skill.

A piece of drapery is like a necktie, hot stuff to paint, and one of the easiest things for a painter to kid himself into thinking he can do. Don't be fooled by the color. Go after the shape and character. Hew the forms together with colored tones.

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.

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.

My father writes through clothes.

I try to push design boundaries using new draping and fabric manipulation techniques every time I approach a new design.

I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

When you see a fashion show, you see those seven minutes of what was six months of tedious work of, you know, going up an inch and down an inch, changing it from one shade of red to another shade of red. So it's the same as any creative process. The result is what we see, but the process is really labor intensive and work.

Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes - and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s.

I have made bouquets of pleats, bouquets of flowers, bouquets of ruffles, bouquets of feathers. Often I design in mousseline, held tightly around the waist, and with something else going on all around.

I can make 10 jackets of the same colour, same two pockets and same length, that will look like 10 completely different jackets when you put them on. It's about the way they are cut - it makes them look and feel completely different and move differently, and that's a never-ending study. People who wear my clothes will know exactly what I mean.

Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

It's a fabulous thing to give life to fabric, to make something move well, the harmony of colour.

I trained three or four days a week for two and a half months, before they'd even let me near the real dress. And I destroyed two practice dresses completely. They were just ripped to shreds. They looked like cats had gotten a hold of them.