Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by Alexander McQueen - Page 2

I hate it when people romanticize Scotland.

I am a melancholy type of person.

I can't get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it's just crass.

There are only a handful of designers that influence other designers, and I have to keep one step ahead of the game.

I'm about what goes through people's minds. The stuff that people don't want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what's buried in people's psyches.

I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time.

For me, what I do is an artistic expression which is channeled through me. Fashion is just the medium.

There’s blood beneath every layer of skin.

It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.

I think there is beauty in everything. What 'normal' people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it.

I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O. I am not big on women looking naive. There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy of sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it-and sometimes a lot of it-like a masquerade.

It is important to look at death because it is a part of life. It is a sad thing, melancholy but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle - everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.

My friend George and I were walking on the beach in Norfolk, and there were thousands of [razor-clam] shells. They were so beautiful, I thought I had to do something with them. So, we decided to make [a dress] out of them. . . . The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O’Conner] came out and trashed the dress, so their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really.

There has to be a balance between your mental satisfaction and the financial needs of your company. (But) I always remember that it's the fantasy, the artistic side, that makes customers want to buy the straightforward black pants.

If you ask any lady they want to be taller, they want to be slimmer, you know, and they want a waist. I'm not here to make people look like a sack of potatoes.

Fashion is self confident and fearless.

I don’t want to do a cocktail party. I’d rather people left my shows and vomited.

What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There's a lot of tribalism in the collections.

I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

I find beauty in melancholy.

I was literally 3 years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life, through primary school, secondary school, all my life. I always, always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of twelve. I followed designer's careers. I knew Giorgio Armani was a window-dresser, Emanuel Ungaro was a tailor.

I think there is beauty in everything.

Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.

When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there’s a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off.

I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.

There comes a time in your life when you focus solely on what you believe is right, regardless of what everybody else is doing.

There is no better designer than nature

The world needs fantasy, not reality. We have enough reality today

Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality.

You've got to know the rules to break them.

I like things to be modern and still have a bit of tradition

It's almost like putting armor on a woman. It's a very psychological way of dressing.

Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I’m inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It’s so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women.

The reason I'm patriotic about Scotland is because I think it's been dealt a really hard hand. It's marketed the world over as . . . haggis . . . bagpipes. But no one ever puts anything back into it.

I am an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world. I wanted to show a more poetic side to my work. It was all about... a feeling of sadness, but in a cinematic kind of way. I find beauty in melancholy.

There's beauty in anger, and anger for me is a passion.

I'm prepared to forget about money if it affects my creativity because, remember, I started off with nothing. And I can do that again.

Life to me is a bit of a (Brothers) Grimm fairy tale.

Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual.

I'm 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I'm dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above earth.

I'm the pink sheep in the family.

I believe in that one-on-one sell. I don't really believe in flooding the market with loads of goods that don't mean much, and you lose your identity.

These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn’t be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.

You've got to know the rules to break them. That's what I'm here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.

Style is not about the clothes, it's about the individual

I use things that people want to hide in their heads. War, religion, sex; things we all think about, but don’t bring to the forefront. But I do and I force them to watch it

I was this young boy and I saw this man with his hands round my sister's neck, I was just standing there with her two children beside me... Everything I've done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naïve. And so, when everyone started saying I was a misogynist, that really freaked me out. They didn't know me. They didn't know what I had seen in my life. That was the first part of fashion that I hated - people labeling me without knowing me.

The explosion of museum exhibitions is only a mirror image of what has happened to fashion itself this millennium. With the force of technology, instant images and global participation, fashion has developed from being a passion for a few to a fascination - and an entertainment - for everybody.

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.

I am constantly trying to reflect the way women are treated. It's hard to interpret that in clothes or in a show but there's always an underlying, sinister side to women's sexuality in my work because of the way I have seen women treated in my life. Where I come from, a woman met a man, had babies, moved to Dagenham, two up two down, made the dinner, went to bed. That was my image of women and I didn't want that. I wanted to get that out of my head.

When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin Of The Species, no one could have known that the ice cap would melt, that the waters would rise and that life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology and cloning, we must go back to it to survive.When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came.Make no mistake, this is not sci-fi, this is evolution

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don't see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.

There is no way back for me now, I'm going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed possible

It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.

Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex.

People don't want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination.

If you're lucky enough to use something you see in a dream, it is purely original. It's not in the world - it's in your head. I think that is amazing.

When we put the antlers on the model and then draped over it the lace embroidery that we had made, we had to poke them through a £2,000 piece of work. But then it worked because it looks like she's rammed the piece of lace with her antlers. There's always spontaneity. You've got to allow for that in my shows.

If you're an open book, there's no allure.

Let me not forget the use of my own hands, that of a craftsman with eyes... that reflect the technology around me.