111 Quotes by Yves Saint Laurent

I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity – all I hope for in my clothes.

I don’t really like knees.

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don’t burn your wings.

I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me – a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

I’m so secluded. Very alone.

I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it’s worth I did it.

I’d really like to be in closer contact with life. I’m a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.

Decadence attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society’s struggle between life and death is absolutely beautiful.