Today couture has to be expensive, but it shouldn’t look expensive.
Interpretation
Couture should be valuable yet effortlessly elegant.
Karl Lagerfeld's quote emphasizes that high fashion, or couture, can be expensive in terms of craftsmanship and materials, but it should convey a sense of luxury that feels not ostentatious or overly showy. The essence lies in achieving elegance that appears natural rather than forced, suggesting that true style doesn't need to scream its worth.
In practice
A fashion designer's presentation about modern couture designs.
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.
To me, eyewear goes way beyond being a prescription. It's like makeup. It's the most incredible accessory. The shape of a frame or the color of lenses can change your whole appearance.
I want my clothes, my stores, everything I design to have that feeling of being natural and easy. And that takes effort, but you try not to have it show.
Fashion condemns us to many follies, the greatest is to make oneself its slave.
Patrick Demarchelier was the one who got me my first Vogue cover. It was French Vogue - I think in ’87 or ’88. I think I was the first black model to be on the cover of French Vogue, which was shocking to me because when I asked them about it, they were like, "Oh, no. We’ve never had that before."
I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.
Basic clothes are for all women, to last for decades and decades. They are the future and will never change. I am persuaded of that.
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