Quotes About Design

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city. Ask what are the clothes of the city, what does this city represent for me?

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city.

I worked in fashion, but I worked more in the sales side of fashion than in design. I was an assistant buyer for a department store back in the '70s and the early years of Saint Laurent. And I used to have a lot of private clients that I bought for.

For clothes, I like this little store on Fountain, Matrushka Construction. Beth Ann Whittaker and Laura Howe make amazing things. You can get a designer skirt with cool embroidery for 40 bucks instead of $400 or $4,000.

It looks like it's been furnished by discount stores.

I want my clothes, my stores, everything I design to have that feeling of being natural and easy. And that takes effort, but you try not to have it show.

I wanted stores that would feel like a comfortable room in my apartment, cozy and colorful and different.

My company is an extension of me, so when I designed my stores I wanted people to feel that they were in my home.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.

You can't separate the clothes from the stores, from the environment.

I had left the runway because I had come to believe that it was questionably relevant and appropriate, because we were creating clothes that, to a large degree, never ended up making it to the stores. And the runway was being seen in markets where those clothes weren't available.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in the bedroom is that they plan to be doing things other than sleeping in the bedroom. They will have a desk in there for working, or they'll have a big shelf in there for storing things. It should be all about relaxing.

I can sketch up a storm, and I'm very involved in how clothes are constructed, but I have a short attention span.

The most beautiful products or the most elegant or seductive products, in my mind, are those that tell a story of a process.

Every good look needs a storyline.

I'm an engineer by trade, and what engineers do is they go and build, and they don't think a lot about storytelling.

For a modern look, hang curtains from the ceiling with a very simple pleat at the top so they will hang straight.

A house is very much like a portrait. I cannot disconnect houses from people. The thought of arrangement, the curves and straight lines. It gives an indication of the character at the heart of it.

The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.

The straight line is ungodly.

By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.

My interest was always to do interdisciplinary work with space. I thought of architecture as one strand in a multimedia practice.

Why do guests always end up in the kitchen at parties? Is it a social phenomenon? Some strange gravitational pull? I don't know, but one thing is for sure: If your friends are going to congregate in your kitchen, you'd better make it as nice as possible.

The color, the shape, and the texture—none of it is accidental. Every item we wear has a glorious (or sometimes not so glorious) history, and that history extends back years—centuries, even—before Oscar de la Renta's 2002 collection.