Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by Riccardo Tisci
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Italian fashion designer Riccardo Tisci.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
We are Italian. We are all little tribes - not only in fashion, but also in music - in everything, basically.
My mom didn't teach me about Marco Polo. She didn't teach me about Napoleon. She didn't teach me about any of that. But she did teach me how to survive and to be a good person. And you need to be a strong woman to do that. She's the biggest person in my life. She's my Virgin Maria. That's why I love religion so much.
I like when a man has one strong accessory. If it's a watch, it has to be major. If you have strong shoes, it should just be the shoes. I don't like when a man is overdone-that's just bad taste. Coco Chanel was always saying you have to watch yourself in the mirror, put on a lot of things, and then take them off. I think it should be that way for men as well.
I believe that couture is not about shocking.
I've always been obsessed with things that are half animal and half human - like mermaids and Minotaurs - because they are trapped in an animal body. And I felt trapped in my own life.
Being a creative mind, you have to examine who you are every day.
The couture client wants the latest things, but she wants the clothes to be super-special - the fabrics won't even touch or go near anything like prêt-à-porter.
I’m very faithful to myself. When you do things that are true it just comes out quite instinctively.
With couture you have faithfulness - people are faithful to you. In couture, you will see that the cut looks like a lace dress from a distance, but it's only when you get nearer you understand that it's layers of lace, hand stitched in a certain shape, all the work - the zips, the buttons, the hooks... it goes on.
When I was young, especially when I was at school, I thought couture was about big gowns, big hats (that is couture as well, of course) - but my couture is about going near the clothes and having a look at the details. I like people to have a shock in a chic way.
For me, creating the clothes of Givenchy is the way to make my tribe. It's related to religion, too, because it's people trying to find identity - the young generation is looking for tribes. You have the hip-hop tribes, the punk tribes, the rockers, you have the hipsters, the bourgeois ... The fact of the tribe is that it's like a religion. Punk is like a religion, because it's a belief.
Religion and love don't have a price, don't have a gender, a skin color, nothing. We are all on the same plate.
I love hip-hop and R&B. People always say, "You are dark, you make dark dresses. You probably only love The Cure or Diamanda Galás." I love Diamanda Galás, but I also love Madonna, Beyoncé, and Courtney Love. They are all from different worlds, but they all evoke emotions in me. I am someone who needs emotions and needs to transmit them. If that weren't the case, I'd be better off changing professions.
I think my heart is in a very good place. And I think this is why I'm achieving what I've been asking to do in the universe for so long.
I remember that my sisters gave me this beautiful, like, empty book for Christmas. And I would draw all these beautiful women. Most of the time it was mermaids and a Minotaur: half human, half animal. I used to be obsessed with Minotaurs when I was a child.
If you buy a Cartier ring you want people to know it is a Cartier ring or a diamond, or a piece of art that's giving an emotion - then people read it and say, "wow that's really amazing". With prêt-à-porter you see people in the street, in a club, in a restaurant or whatever, and you think, "Oh my god, he's wearing my trousers!" In a way it's more open - people can put together the way they want - mixed with other designers.
When I arrived here at Givenchy, there was a lot of confusion. Before me, there had been some great geniuses - John Galliano and Alexander McQueen are great masters. They marked history. But when I came in after Julien Macdonald, it was also a bit of a mess, because not even I could understand what the true identity of Givenchy was. Everyone thinks that it's only Audrey Hepburn, but there is a whole other world behind it.
I am very happy at Givenchy and it is a moment in which I am bringing the game to the next level. I feel at home. It's as if it were my son. I don't know how to explain it. It would be very difficult for me to leave.
One thing my mom didn't want any of us to do was to cry or to complain about life. Every day and night, even when we didn't have much food, we would pray together. And that for me was a beautiful moment. The fact of being poor didn't really hurt me.
My truth is this: That I don't know what will happen tomorrow because you can never know.
When I was 12, I used to dress as a woman in the house. At the time, cross-dressing was a big taboo in Italy. It was better to have a son who was a drug addict than a cross-dresser.
Couture is also a matter of respect. In the end, all of these women sewing and embroidering the clothes, whom are almost all my mother's age, they're all 70 or 80 years old, have been here for a lifetime. They spend hours on it and come up with solutions. And because it's on a catwalk, people see if for five seconds and don't even see the technique, the drapery.
To leave Italy at 17 without money and go to a country like England is very rare; Italians stay with the family until 30, 35. But I couldn't stand to live in this box anymore. I was getting bigger, and the box was getting smaller.
I tried to never exclude people. I know what it means to be left out.
I am interested in beauty when it has something special and mysterious.
My definition of beauty is something between extremely ugly and extremely fantastic.
My great strength, which I very much believe in, is family. For me, family doesn't simply mean components of DNA. I mean family in the sense of siblings. My mom and my sisters are the energy and inspiration in my life.
I always think about the streets because that's where I come from and that's where I'm going to die one day. That is my life.
People's wardrobes in history are something that society and culture imposed. But sexuality is not about the way you dress.
I am very attracted to the United States. Why? Well, as a little kid from Southern Italy, not from a wealthy family, it was always my dream to go to the Big Apple. I'm not one to listen to classical music. I am very much for what is American, but I also prefer the America of the ghetto. I love the Bronx. I love hip-hop and R&B. I love electro-Latino, Latin music, that whole realm.
My life has changed financially and I have a name, but I try to never forget people on my journey.
No matter how much people in fashion think we're so cool and avant-garde, for most fashion people, creativity is quite taboo.
Couture is more your own world, they come and buy head-to-toe - they buy the jewelry, bags, coats, dresses, bodies underneath.... But couture is not dead - it's taken another shape.
I can give a beautiful present, and that may change the lives of people around me.
There was a loneliness because kids my age had video games, tennis. They traveled. They had beautiful clothes. I was wearing my sisters' old clothes that were adjusted on me, because we didn't have money to buy clothes. So that really made me go deep inside on my heart, because the only things I could have with me were my heart and my brain.
I didn't know I was going to become a designer; I was going to become a successful person, but I really wanted to be free.
If I am in fashion, it is really due to very few designers that I admire - not because I don't like the rest, or that the rest are not beautiful, but because I am very selective. I adore Versace. I adore Helmut Lang, despite the fact that it's over.
Sex is something I live very well, but it is something I revealed very slowly in my fashion. What I do is emotional. For me, there is a base, which is my Italian roots. It's a strong passion for fashion, a passion for sensuality and dressing for one's self.
I was the last one of nine kids - eight girls and me last - and my sisters were going out. They were teenagers. And as they were getting ready, I would sit on the bathtub and watch them put on makeup and transform themselves - you know, putting on clothes and giggling about the boys they were going to meet and everything. So for me, that was an amazing thing - the fact of transforming themselves.
I love finding new things. I love the conceptual aspect of Antony Hegarty or the voices of those back in the day like Lil' Kim, Missy Elliott, Ciara. I love what evokes emotion in me.
I didn't invent hot water. But when I approach menswear, I do it in a very honest way. And my menswear and womenswear are very similar, in the sense that I put men in leggings and lace shirts.
The elegance of the Italian South is a very strong elegance and it is one that I bring. It is a sexy elegance - or at least, let's say less chaste.
I love art and music more than I love fashion, to be honest.
Seduction is about intelligence and wit. Someone who makes me laugh has every chance to seduce me.
Couture is emotion. Couture is freedom. Couture is not thinking about pricing and not thinking about craziness. You can do whatever you want to do in couture.
For me, darkness is something very beautiful.
For me, fashion is a job. I love it. It's my passion. But the most important thing for me in general is life.
I didn't want to dress anyone in the beginning, no celebrities. Then, very slowly I started with one, two, like that. There are some celebrities whom we dress because they are part of the family. They are women I admire. I don't care how famous she is, if she is at the movies or in a concert.
I had only two girlfriends. I didn't have many friends because I was staying at home and dreaming - drawing and dreaming.
I try to destroy taboo in fashion-which is something I learned as a kid. I come from the street, and you have to be a survivor.
Couture was only for rich people. Givenchy was for rich people. A bag cost 5,000 euro; a coat cost 10,000 euro. In the beginning, I couldn't react. I was just working like a machine, because I wanted to make the house happy.
My inspiration comes from many sources, and one of those sources is precisely the maison Versace. When I was a little boy, my family was not very well off. I had a sister who worked in a hairdressing salon. I lost my dad when I was 4 or 5 years old. I grew up with eight sisters and my mom. Nine incredible women all a little "à la Donatella Versace." Real strong women from the South of Italy, women who had sensuality. They had a confidence in their body and in their sensuality. And it was a poor family, I am very proud to say it.
I hate vulgarity. I hate vulgarity even though it attracts me - and it attracts me very much. I love all that is transgressive or vulgar. But in my opinion, it has to reach a limit that is always a little surreal and never becomes in your face.
My relationship with religion is very strong because it was my hope, and it gave me two things very important in my life. It gave me the belief and it gave me a point to reach: Don't do something bad to the people next to you.
I've got what I want, and I've got the luck to express myself and to be paid and to do what I do as a creative person.
Black is always elegant. It is the most complete colour in the whole world, made of all the colours in the palette.
Anything I do, I do with my heart. This is why I sometimes get very upset or sometimes get very personal when I'm working.
My obsession when I was kid, from '85 into the '90s, was Gianni Versace. It was Helmut Lang. It was Margiela. So I said, "I cannot have Givenchy only as a luxury house; I'm going to introduce products for everybody, things that are reachable."
I brought a lot of the codification of womenswear to menswear. Why? Because when I was a child, I was wearing women's clothes adjusted to me.
In the beginning, I was very punk. I was very revolutionary. When they asked me to do Givenchy, I didn't want to do it. My friends pushed me. But the situation with my family was so bad financially. I really did it because, when they told me how much they would pay me, I saw that my sisters and my mom could have a better life.
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