Yves Saint-Laurent Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

My name will be written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysees.

Yves Saint-Laurent
Decadence attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society's struggle between life and death is absolutely beautiful.

Yves Saint-Laurent
Finding your own style is not easy, but once found it brings complete happiness. It gives you self-confidence, always.

Yves Saint-Laurent
Anyone who reaches for great expression has to be careful of the ridiculous.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I find men's clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.

Yves Saint-Laurent
A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn't learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.

Yves Saint-Laurent
What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

Yves Saint-Laurent
Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

Yves Saint-Laurent
I love women. I love all the bright and attractive people and things of this world, the flame and also the moth, the dancer and the dance.

Yves Saint-Laurent
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I cannot pretend to do sculpture and make a woman the ridiculous pedestal of my pretensions. To render clothing poetic, yes--but one must preserve its dignity as clothing.

Yves Saint-Laurent
Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won't come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me--a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I knew the youthfulness of the sixties: Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakesh, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I have always believed that fashion was not made only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.

Yves Saint-Laurent
We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.

Yves Saint-Laurent
I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.

Yves Saint-Laurent
A good model can advance fashion by ten years.

Yves Saint-Laurent