Alexander McQueen Quotes

There has to be a balance between your mental satisfaction and the financial needs of your company. (But) I always remember that it's the fantasy, the artistic side, that makes customers want to buy the straightforward black pants.

If you ask any lady they want to be taller, they want to be slimmer, you know, and they want a waist. I'm not here to make people look like a sack of potatoes.

Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex.

Fashion is self confident and fearless.

The reason I'm patriotic about Scotland is because I think it's been dealt a really hard hand. It's marketed the world over as . . . haggis . . . bagpipes. But no one ever puts anything back into it.

I am an avid follower of the news, and sometimes you just can't take any more war, any more disasters, and you want to remind yourself there's beauty in the world. I wanted to show a more poetic side to my work. It was all about... a feeling of sadness, but in a cinematic kind of way. I find beauty in melancholy.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don't see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.

You've got to know the rules to break them.

You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don't need to do that any more.

You've got to know the rules to break them. That's what I'm here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.

I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.

I find beauty in melancholy.

Life to me is a bit of a (Brothers) Grimm fairy tale.

I just want to be a wallflower. Nondescript. Just not anything. I don't want to see me.

Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive.

When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there’s a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off.

I'm 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I'm dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above earth.

I think there is beauty in everything. What 'normal' people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it.

I was never a big networker, but I was a spin doctor, all those shock shows, that's how I got my first backers. But fashion's a scary industry to be in, especially if you've not grown up with it.

I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time.

I am a melancholy type of person.

I think I should be a president. President of the United States.

Fame should be left to the film stars.

It's almost like putting armor on a woman. It's a very psychological way of dressing.

You can get insular with fashion.

There has to be a balance between your mental satisfaction and the financial needs of your company.

For me, what I do is an artistic expression which is channeled through me. Fashion is just the medium.

There comes a time in your life when you focus solely on what you believe is right, regardless of what everybody else is doing.

It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.

I like things to be modern and still have a bit of tradition

I am married to work.

I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

There is no better designer than nature

I'm the pink sheep in the family.

I don’t want to do a cocktail party. I’d rather people left my shows and vomited.

These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn’t be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.

I am constantly trying to reflect the way women are treated. It's hard to interpret that in clothes or in a show but there's always an underlying, sinister side to women's sexuality in my work because of the way I have seen women treated in my life. Where I come from, a woman met a man, had babies, moved to Dagenham, two up two down, made the dinner, went to bed. That was my image of women and I didn't want that. I wanted to get that out of my head.

I was literally 3 years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life, through primary school, secondary school, all my life. I always, always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of twelve. I followed designer's careers. I knew Giorgio Armani was a window-dresser, Emanuel Ungaro was a tailor.

If you're an open book, there's no allure.

When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin Of The Species, no one could have known that the ice cap would melt, that the waters would rise and that life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology and cloning, we must go back to it to survive.When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came.Make no mistake, this is not sci-fi, this is evolution

Having money hasn't changed me. If anything it's made my life worse. People come up to you who knew you before you were famous and who didn't come up to you before. I'm a clever designer. I can do what the client wants. But I'm prepared to forget about money if it affects my creativity because, remember, I started off with nothing. And I can do that again.

Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual.

I can't get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it's just crass.

The police need to come down to street level.

Fashions fade, style is eternal. - Yves Saint-LaurentThe most important thing to remember is that you can wear all the greatest clothes and all the greatest shoes, but you've got to have a good spirit on the inside. That's what's really going to make you look like you're ready to rock the world. - Alicia KeysIt's a new era in fashion - there are no rules. It's all about the individual and personal style, wearing high-end, low-end, classic labels, and up-and-coming designers all together.

You can only go forward by making mistakes. I'm twenty-seven, not fifty-seven. I'm not Givenchy, I'm Alexander McQueen.

I work with people I admire and respect. It's never because of who they are.

Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.