People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.
Interpretation
Creativity often requires solitude for rejuvenation and inspiration.
In this quote, Karl Lagerfeld emphasizes the necessity of solitude for individuals in creative fields. He suggests that constant exposure or being in the spotlight can drain creativity, and to truly unleash one's creative potential, one must take time alone to recharge and reflect. This solitude is presented not as a loneliness but as a form of victory, highlighting its importance for the creative process.
In practice
During a talk on artistic processes, one might quote Lagerfeld to highlight the importance of solitude for inspiration.
I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don't have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.
I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.
If I could be reincarnated as a fashion accessory, it would be a shopping bag.
Chic is a kind of mayonnaise, either it tastes, or it doesn't.
Why should I stop working? If I do, I'll die and it'll all be finished. 'm lucky to work in the most perfect of conditions. I can do what I want in all kinds of areas. The expenses are not expenses. I would be stupid to stop that. Work is making a living out of being bored.
Elegance has nothing to do with fashion.
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
Before we start anything creatively, we have a firm understanding of our objective and our frame of mind for the campaign. Who's our audience, and what's their day-to-day behavior? How can we complement those behaviors? How is our message more than an interruption? Why would people care about what we're saying?
If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.
People want to be creatively satisfied, and having fun is such an important part of that.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
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