Explore Quotes by Rei Kawakubo

I am not aware I am an icon.

I don't look very much at magazines or go to vintage stores.

The corporateness of the fashion industry tends to take away or distort the freedom of creation.

My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk and do not have an exact starting point for any collection.

What you wear can largely govern your feelings and your emotions, and how you look influences the way people regard you. So fashion plays an important role on both the practical level and the aesthetic level.

I would have liked to invent the plain white shirt, with a skirt and pants to go with it.

Even though it is difficult, it is easier for me to make my own things, by myself.

I'm not an artist: I'm a businesswoman. Well, maybe an artist/businesswoman.

This idea of collaborating with designers - that's something I can identify with.

The first thing you need in order to make a business viable is to preserve a cash flow. I made sure I didn't have any financial backing or support.

When you put on clothes that are fighting against something, you can feel your courage grow. Clothing can set you free.

I don't like to explain the clothes, how I made them, the theme, et cetera. It's because the clothes are just as you see them and feel them. That's what I want... just see and feel them.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

Many parts of the media have created the situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive.

Growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it is not why I do the work I do. It is a very personal thing - everything comes from inside.

What someone wears is an expression of oneself. When you're just comfortable with what you're wearing, you don't have new thoughts. I want people to feel something and think about who they are.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.

In order to be stimulated or moved in the future, we probably have to go into space and look at our world from there.

The main pillar of my activity is making clothes, but this can never be the perfect and only vehicle of expression.

I am just working every day, day to day, with what I believe. It's a very ordinary way of dealing with your life - just dealing with your work.

As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere.