Upscale Shopping Quotes

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.

It took me years to get out of the bargain basement. I always wanted to walk into a men's store and buy a cashmere sweater.

I've always been a free trader. I trade freely on Bond street, Rodeo Drive, Fifth Avenue, Worth Avenue.

The thing about New York is it's like London: you want to go to the boutique places. You can go to the big department stores - Barney's, Bloomingdales and all that stuff - but I like the little stores.

Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.

I don't like the collusion between high fashion design and high street. You have to know where you stand. I belong to luxury fashion. That's what I've always felt and embraced. I like the best quality, the best fabrics and the most creative field in fashion. I will stay consistent. I belong to this world.

When I look at a Ralph Lauren store, it is not a store: it's an experience.

In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families - the Conrans and the Ashleys - who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.

I used to go to Saks, I would go to Bergdorf, I would go to Barneys, I would go to thrift stores in SoHo.

Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn, where everything new and exciting seems to be.

If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford.

When our customer leaves Urban Outfitters, the Main Line is the type of place where more of them go than don't.

I want 'Vogue' to feel like a shop that you're not scared to walk into, one that's quite welcoming.

Rodeo Drive is a giant butterscotch sundae.

I have a few customers who have two or three hundred bags. When you see a lady carrying a little dog bag or a little cat bag or an egg, it makes you happy.

I get as excited walking around a CVS as I do walking around in Bergdorf's.

Selfridges - we just look; we don't shop!

Saks is one of the temples of good-quality products in America. The Saks shop in New York, for me, is the most interesting department store in America.

I don't do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn't like having her taste in interiors put through the mill. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious shops in the neighbourhood - because I hate them just as much.

The luxury industry has always been a little bit counter-cyclical.

For clothes, I like Dover Street Market and Acne. For vintage, I go to Mint just off Seven Dials. For shoes, it's Church's and Russell & Bromley.

Oh, I shop all over the place, really. Like I love department stores like Barney's and Saks and stuff like that. But I also just like to walk in Soho and find some interesting boutique that doesn't really have a huge name or following, and I'll go in and find something amazing.

There is a lot of growth taking place in capturing aspirational consumers and converting them to luxury as they evolve.

I'm not a Bal Harbour Shops kind of guy.