Quotes About Identity

I hate that when you introduce yourself, and you're a rapper, sometimes you gotta say, 'I'm a musician.' Or, 'I'm an artist.' 'I'm a recording artist.' 'I'm a vocalist.'

Elvis inspired my sideburns, but Little Richard inspired me for vocals.

I got into punk at 17 after discovering an all-girl band from Long Island on the Internet called The Devotchkas - four crazy-looking girls with fast, driving basslines and high-pitched gang vocals who shared the same dress sense as the punks I used to eye up curiously in Camden.

What it means to look like a woman or man changes regionally - from mannerisms to clothes to posture to makeup to even your vocals - so I just observe, and I replicate.

Dostoevski was on to something. You are the path you choose. You are what your vocation is.

When our purpose is external, we may never find it. If we tie our purpose or meaning to our vocation, goal or an activity, we're more than likely setting ourselves up for suffering down the line.

My vocation is I do what I do. I'm an actor; that's what I do.

II'm quite a successful musician, but I'm not sure if it's my vocation.

I was a stay-at-home mom, with an important job to raise the kids. I filled it into the occupation slot on innumerable immigration cards, looking at the officer with defiant pride. What was I then, now that actively raising my children was no longer my vocation?

There aren't a ton of trans people in general, so in any vocation there's probably not going to be a ton of trans people. So I've been thinking about what me doing stand-up or me doing comedy means in terms of representation.

In a certain sense we can be proud to have introduced this hairstyle to Europe. 'Plica polonica' should be added to the list of our inventions, alongside crude oil, pierogi and vodka.

Being on the cover of 'Vogue' at 15 meant nothing to me. I never really understood what it was they were looking at, what they saw in me.

'Vogue' should be about giving a voice to all different cultures.

People always associated me with 'Vogue,' 'Vogue Living,' or 'Elle Decor.'

I couldn't identify with the images in 'Elle' or 'Vogue' or 'Harper's Bazaar.' Nobody in the world we're walking around in actually looks like that.

I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.

In 1986, I returned to London as editor in chief of 'British Vogue.' Although I still thought of myself as totally English, to my surprise, everyone here thought I was some sort of American control freak.

In 2017, there is more than one way to be beautiful and more than one way to be cool. And when you put an image on the cover of 'Vogue,' that means something that goes beyond fashion.

Patrick Demarchelier was the one who got me my first 'Vogue' cover. It was French 'Vogue' - I think in '87 or '88. I think I was the first black model to be on the cover of French Vogue, which was shocking to me because when I asked them about it, they were like, 'Oh, no. We've never had that before.'

My mother, all of her sisters and my siblings all went through a stage from the age of about 15 to 19 where they widened and then lengthened. Had I not been modelling, that would have been a phase that was in a family photo album rather than in Vogue.

I don't think the woman in French 'Vogue' was an object. She was always a real woman.

'Vogue' is a very specific world. You are 'Vogue,' or not 'Vogue.'

Occasionally, I will come across something that has lost its label over the years - maybe the client didn't want to declare the dress at customs and took the label out - but I'll recognize it from an image that I've seen in Vogue, or a little thumbnail sketch.

Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at 'Teen Vogue.' We were willing to lose some to have more.