Top 100 Alexander McQueen Quotes
#1. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#6. I like the concept of dressing people. I used to not care whether people bought the clothes or not, but I kind of like it now. I wouldn't label that commercialism; it's more like I do this work because I want people to wear it.
Alexander McQueen
#7. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#8. I like the idea of infiltrating an area that is not really exposed to me or my work.
Alexander McQueen
#9. I just want to be a wallflower. Nondescript. Just not anything. I don't want to see me.
Alexander McQueen
#10. When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you're an open book, there's no allure.
Alexander McQueen
#11. Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive. I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there's no room for fault. But I don't expect to turn things around all by myself. I'm not a saint.
Alexander McQueen
#12. Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual. When you see a woman in my clothes, you want to know more about them. To me, that is what distinguishes good designers from bad designers.
Alexander McQueen
#15. There has to be a balance between your mental satisfaction and the financial needs of your company.
Alexander McQueen
#16. It is important to look at death because it is a part of life. It is a sad thing, melancholy but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle - everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.
Alexander McQueen
#19. I think the idea of mixing luxury and mass-market fashion is very modern, very now - no one wears head-to-toe designer anymore.
Alexander McQueen
#20. It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.
Alexander McQueen
#21. I don't want to be too proud, but I have a good personal style.
Alexander McQueen
#22. I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.
Alexander McQueen
#23. Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.
Alexander McQueen
#25. There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.
Alexander McQueen
#26. Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I'm inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It's so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women.
Alexander McQueen
#27. The world needs fantasy, not reality. We have enough reality today
Alexander McQueen
#29. I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I am dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.
Alexander McQueen
#30. I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.
Alexander McQueen
#35. I have been skiing since I was in school, but I'm not great. I am never going to break an Olympic record, I just want to go down the hills, on red or blue runs, but not ... black.
Alexander McQueen
#36. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#37. Of course I make mistakes. I'm human. If I didn't make mistakes, I'd never learn. You can only go forward by making mistakes.
Alexander McQueen
#38. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#39. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#41. I can't get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it's just crass.
Alexander McQueen
#42. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#43. I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.
Alexander McQueen
#46. Menswear is about subtlety. It's about good style and good taste.
Alexander McQueen
#48. You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don't need to do that any more.
Alexander McQueen
#49. Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality.
Alexander McQueen
#50. It's good to know where you come from. It makes you what you are today. It's DNA, it's in your blood.
Alexander McQueen
#52. I don't want to do a cocktail party. I'd rather people left my shows and vomited.
Alexander McQueen
#53. There are only a handful of designers that influence other designers, and I have to keep one step ahead of the game.
Alexander McQueen
#54. I came to terms with not fitting in a long time ago. I never really fitted in. I don't want to fit in. And now people are buying into that.
Alexander McQueen
#55. I was three years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life.
Alexander McQueen
#56. I think I should be a president. President of the United States.
Alexander McQueen
#57. I'm mad in the front of my mind, but business-minded in the back.
Alexander McQueen
#58. It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.
Alexander McQueen
#61. I think sometimes I might scare the editors, because they might feel they're getting old and they're not understanding it. The problem lies on their side of the fence, not mine. I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era.
Alexander McQueen
#62. It's not my vision when I cover a woman's face with a chador. I got the idea from a 'National Geographic' photo. I'm just showing their plight in the world.
Alexander McQueen
#63. People don't want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination
Alexander McQueen
#65. Youth culture now really looks back and embraces the past, but keeps it contemporary but not sticking to one particular style.
Alexander McQueen
#67. Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't.
Alexander McQueen
#68. 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.
Alexander McQueen
#69. I never look at other people's work. My mind has to be completely focused on my own illusions.
Alexander McQueen
#71. I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I've always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it's late.
Alexander McQueen
#72. If you're lucky enough to use something you see in a dream, it is purely original. It's not in the world - it's in your head. I think that is amazing.
Alexander McQueen
#73. For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.
Alexander McQueen
#74. For a long time I was looking for my perfect equilibrium, my mojo. And now I think I'm getting there: I've found my customer, my silhouette, my cut.
Alexander McQueen
#75. I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.
Alexander McQueen
#77. It's almost like putting armor on a woman. It's a very psychological way of dressing.
Alexander McQueen
#78. As a designer, you've always got to push yourself forward; you've always got to keep up with the trends or make your own trends. That's what I do.
Alexander McQueen
#79. There is no way back for me now, I'm going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed possible
Alexander McQueen
#80. I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. I have to force people to look at things.
Alexander McQueen
#81. My relationships with producers or photographers - these are relationships that took years.
Alexander McQueen
#83. I use things that people want to hide in their heads. War, religion, sex; things we all think about, but don't bring to the forefront. But I do and I force them to watch it
Alexander McQueen
#84. You find a lot of ideas from my shows in adverts now. I find it a compliment.
Alexander McQueen
#85. I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time.
Alexander McQueen
#86. I believe in that one-on-one sell. I don't really believe in flooding the market with loads of goods that don't mean much, and you lose your identity.
Alexander McQueen
#88. Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex.
Alexander McQueen
#89. I work with people I admire and respect. It's never because of who they are.
Alexander McQueen
#90. The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.
Alexander McQueen
#91. Let me not forget the use of my own hands, that of a craftsman with eyes ... that reflect the technology around me.
Alexander McQueen
#93. I'm about what goes through people's minds. The stuff that people don't want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what's buried in people's psyches.
Alexander McQueen
#94. British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.
Alexander McQueen
#95. The explosion of museum exhibitions is only a mirror image of what has happened to fashion itself this millennium. With the force of technology, instant images and global participation, fashion has developed from being a passion for a few to a fascination - and an entertainment - for everybody.
Alexander McQueen
#96. I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.
Alexander McQueen
#97. What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress ... There's a lot of tribalism in the collections,
Alexander McQueen
#98. You can only go forward by making mistakes. I'm twenty-seven, not fifty-seven. I'm not Givenchy, I'm Alexander McQueen.
Alexander McQueen
#99. London's where I was brought up. It's where my heart is and where I get my inspiration,
Alexander McQueen
#100. 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.
Alexander McQueen
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