Jason Wu Quotes

I worked 10 years as a toy designer before I started my career as a fashion designer. It's something I just fell into and really liked.

I was very preppy in my childhood. I also went through an anti-clothing moment where I just wanted to wear sweats because I'd just moved to Canada. My mom was always trying to get me into proper clothes, but I never wanted to wear them, and now that's all I wear.

I hope I am the antithesis of disposable fashion.

I don't know if I would want to come back as anything but me. I feel really satisfied. I don't really want to be anyone else. I just feel like I've gotten everything I signed up for as me. I'm happy as me.

I love a little bit of glamour and I love tall girls.

I think it's really important to make things your own in your voice. I started when I was 23, and in the beginning of my career, there was this expectation of a young designer being edgier, cooler, more downtown. But I was never that person.

When I was 12 or 13 I already knew that I was gay. And then my interests were not conventional. So I was very different, in every sense of the word. And in an all-boys school, that's tough.

I am an Asian designer. I was born in Taiwan. That is who I am. But I am a designer, like any designer of any race. Growing up in the '80s in Taiwan, the arts were not considered a career.

Designers have always shown outlandish and exuberant clothes, but that hasnt always translated to the streets.

I would love to take an old space and restore it to exactly the way I want it. Like an old factory, just something with great bones and lots of character. I'd take an old house and flip it into something very modern inside, or the other way around.

Actually, I'm probably 99-and-a-half percent plastic now.

I don't collect things per se, but I do pick up things as I go. Like, in my studio I have an old sewing machine from Germany that my dad gave me, and then something else that I got from a friend in India, and a piece of flooring from one of my shows.

The polishedness and the sophistication were what I was interested in. I mean, give me a polka dot, a floral print, a pleated dress, a big fur coat, that was always my language, and it wasn't very "in" when I was starting out, so I had a difficult time in the beginning.

My inspirations come from everywhere. It's important to look at everything and anything.

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't know anything about politics. Every time I go to Washington, I feel like I'm in Legally Blonde.

My parents loved me, and I think they realized that I was probably not going to have a normal 9-to-5 job. For the longest time, my dad thought that I was just going to be home until I was, like, 35, which, weirdly, is completely normal in Asian families.

In American culture you leave home at 18. In the Asian culture, your parents don't really want you to leave home. So my parents just thought I was going to be one of those kids. I was like, "I'm never going to make a living at whatever I do." I just liked pretty things.

In designing for the first lady, I tried to sort of be in her shoes, but I didn't really look at her as an important political figure. I looked at her as a woman who would like to wear a beautiful dress to an important gala.

The idea of transformation is super-important to me. You can see it in the way I approach things. I have never been a clean-faced, freshly scrubbed hair person. I'm the New York designer who doesn't do that. I think about the hair and makeup almost as much as I think about the clothes because it all has to work.

I always have the TV on. When there's no TV, I play music. I like having noise. I think that's why New York is so suitable for me, because it's never really fully quiet.

The worst thing is to be a designer and create work that isn't honest. You have to be honest. Otherwise, you'll always be a reaction to what other people do and you'll always be one step behind.

I hope being gay isn't the most interesting thing about me.

I had a hard time in middle school. I was never really quite me until I was 16 or 17, and things like bullying didn't matter anymore.

I think a beautiful dress on the wrong woman could mean nothing. It has to be the right woman and the right clothes. That's why you need that personal touch. I mean, that's why I went into this business to begin with.

I love old architecture. I love collecting furniture, mixing really earthy things with the very polished. I don't come from an interiors background, so I'm not an expert. I just enjoy going to antiques shows and finding interesting things.

We all want to be a little glamorous, a little playful and a little mischievous at times.

My cats are really sassy and sophisticated, but most importantly, they are picky.

You're always in the mode of creating the next season. It's so fast, and in two months, the collection you just did is already old, and it's always next, next, next.

I need to feel like I'm part of something. I need to feel part of the world when I go to sleep.

Being feminine in the way you dress doesn't have to compromise who you are as a woman or your career.

I think clothing is transformative. When you put something really beautiful on, you feel something. In so many ways, were always playing a form of dress-up - its just a grown-up, much chicer version of it. Its nice to be able to be whoever you want to be.

I miss All Stars, by the way. I was just telling people: how am I going to get by until January?

My mom used to take me to antique shows, which I hated because everything was so dusty and old and there were all these weird ladies selling their antiques. We call them "eclectic" now. But it was really amazing that I was exposed to that when I was younger. Now that I have my own taste, I understand it more.

For a while, I just thought that I wanted to be an illustrator because that's all I wanted to do. I also did some sculpting. It was always very artsy and very feminine, everything that I did.

When I was growing up, you sort of did the unthinkable. You did something that has never really been replicated.

Buy things you truly love, things that are special, but not a lot of them. It’s about value, not quantity.

This is the hardest thing I've ever done, being in fashion business, because that's what it is at the end of the day, a business, and you have to make sure it works.

I guess I accidentally became a part of history. Honestly, when you're young and you're a designer, you have a goal, but that is not the kind of goal that you even think it's possible to achieve.

I think what I create is serious fashion, but I don't want to keep my focus on that. You have to look at a lot of different things. I mean, people are always surprised when they find out that my favorite show is RuPaul's Drag Race.

when I moved to Canada in '93, I started reading fashion magazines, and that's where I spotted the M.A.C ad that RuPaul were in. That's sort of how I first "met" you - in the red bodysuit. That was so iconic to me.

It's nice to be able to be whoever you want to be. I moved to New York for that reason. I think I am a very good example of how you really can do whatever you want to do without having any kind of prerequisite experience of any of kind of connection. None of my family members came from this world.

The way my mom dressed was one of my earliest inspirations, in those '80s suits with shoulder pads and things like that. For years, I ran away from that style. But now, all I want to do is shoulder pads and nipped-in waists and padded hips and peplums and poufed dresses.

I love the idea of working with women because I always feel like a man designing womenswear needs women around him to really have a sense of what they're doing.

As a designer you have to just do whatever you want to do. The second I came to terms with that, it transformed my work.

I realized the importance of archiving. So I save key pieces from my collections, as well as any red-carpet things that become iconic. I always ask for that stuff back. I'm like, "It's going in my archives."

I didn't understand anything about fashion until I moved to Canada when I was 9. That's when I learned English and was exposed to fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

I woke up one day and I was like, "I don't have anything to save for myself for the future." That's when I started archiving things. I take four or five things that are really key to each collection, and I restore them or, in some cases, remake parts of them, and archive them.

I love the romance of Paris. I love Angelina [tearoom and pastry shop]. I always get a Mont-blanc [pastry] there.