Top 24 Quotes & Sayings by Charles James

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American designer Charles James.

Last updated on April 16, 2025.

Charles Wilson Brega James was an English-American fashion designer. He is best known for his ballgowns and highly structured aesthetic. James is one of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century and continues to influence new generations of designers.

American - Designer | July 18, 1906 - September 23, 1978

Source: Wikipedia

All creative work begins by doing something with the hands. Creation is simply a problem and design is the way out.

Charles James

Forget all you know & learn something every day.

Charles James

All my seams have meaning - they emphasize something about the body.

Charles James

My dresses help women discover figures they didn't know they had.

Charles James

In fashion even what seems most fragile must be built on cement.

Charles James

I recognize that virtually every company that comes in here has a perspective. It's often not difficult to understand why they have the perspective that they have.

Charles James

Marriage: The most expensive way to get your laundry done.

Charles James

The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed.

Charles James

It is intolerable that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief.

Charles James

The standard formulation on remedy is that it ought to cure past violations and prevent their recurrence. That's what antitrust is all about.

Charles James

The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear.

Charles James

I spent my life making fashion an art form.

Charles James

You should know that my most important contribution was always in tailoring; coats, jackets, wool dresses… so few of which went into the magazines.

Charles James

Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press.

Charles James

Fashion, after all, is magic and miracle…intended to bestow proportion and beauty where both have been lost or faded with the years.

Charles James

The best design reveals itself during a long fatiguing process of digging into the subconscious.

Charles James

He that is conscious of guilt cannot bear the innocence of others:So they will try to reduce all others to their own level.

Charles James

Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time.

Charles James

So perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another

Charles James

A great designer does not seek acceptance. He challenges popularity, and by the force of his convictions renders popular in the end what the public hates at first sight.

Charles James

Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.

Charles James

True humanity consists not in a squeamish ear; it consists not in starting or shrinking at tales of misery, but in a disposition of heart to relieve it. True humanity appertains rather to the mind than to the nerves, and prompts men to use real and active endeavors to execute the actions which it suggests.

Charles James

There are not many original shapes or silhouettes -- only a million variations.

Charles James

We who have been ahead in STYLE have usually been also ahead in our thinking.

Charles James