Quotes from Rei Kawakubo

The more people that are afraid when they see new creation, the happier I am.

All kinds of ways of expression are spreading out all over the place, information is overflowing, and it's harder and harder to be excited about anything.

Not everyone necessarily needs new things all the time and creative designs. It's good to have luxury restaurants and fast-food restaurants. You need both.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

Many parts of the media have created the situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive.

My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk and do not have an exact starting point for any collection.

I want to make a shop that's unlike any that already exists.

I work in three shades of black.

Celebrity doesn't really affect the work. What affects the work is the expectations from the outside. This is what no one understands.

In response to the making of DSMNY, a change in the Chelsea store became necessary. My flagship stores always have to lead the way.

I am just working every day, day to day, with what I believe. It's a very ordinary way of dealing with your life - just dealing with your work.

I built my work from within instead of satisfying a demand for sexualised and ostentatious clothing.

In order to be stimulated or moved in the future, we probably have to go into space and look at our world from there.

Fashion is not art. The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.

The main pillar of my activity is making clothes, but this can never be the perfect and only vehicle of expression.

Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.

The first thing you need in order to make a business viable is to preserve a cash flow. I made sure I didn't have any financial backing or support.

I don't look very much at magazines or go to vintage stores.

Fashion alone is so far from being the whole story. It seems that with fashion, as with art, things are getting easier in one sense, but at the same time, it is getting harder to be stimulated about things or excite people.

My energy comes from freedom and a rebellious spirit.