Daring to wear something different takes effort.
I was a communist, but being left-wing was fashionable. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.
What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.
You have to embrace the world if you want to live in it now.
I respect my work. But also I think it's very superficial.
You need to have dignity towards how you are, how you dress, how you behave. Very important.
When I talk with people, I don't even see what they are wearing . . . No, I recognize it if it's something particularly nice and interesting. I see the exception.
I love uniforms because they allow you to hide. No one knows what you are thinking, so it's a very appropriate and correct way to be yourself.
The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.
If you ask, do you like strong men or weak men, I'd say, I like who I like.
I like the irony in my work.
People ask me how can I be stylish, how can I be elegant and what can I wear? My only answer is study! You have to learn.
Basically I'm trying to make men more sensitive and women stronger.
It's still feminine, but not in a romantic way. It's all about masculine and feminine, and being strong.
I don't want to say temporary, because temporary is such a trendy word.
I had no fun. My family was too serious.
I'm not interested in how people dress. Of course, I recognize if somebody's elegant. But fashion doesn't interest me.
I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.
I want to make clothes that are beautiful of course, but also clothes that are interesting and considered and intelligent and not out of place.
I'm not interested in how people dress.
When I design and wonder what the point is, I think of someone having a bad time in their life. Maybe they are sad and they wake up and put on something I have made and it makes them feel just a bit better. So, in that sense, fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But only a little.
We will always buy clothes because they let us live our dreams.
Seduction is a matter of feelings and people opening themselves. I don't think it's something tricky - it's being human. And everybody is seduced by something different.
The older I get, the more I prefer to talk to old people. Old people or kids.
For me, it's important to anticipate where fashion is heading.
Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.
Women have the stress of being beautiful, of age and youth. Men don't have all that. And with women, that stress causes a lot of mistakes and bad choices - a lot of not being their true self.
Women always try to tame themselves as they get older, but the ones who look best are often a bit wilder.
I’ve never wanted to be called an artist. The term itself seems old-fashioned. It’s a term that does not relate to modern times. And it’s too confining. What I love about fashion is its accessibility and its democracy. Everyone wears it, and everyone relates to it.
Fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But very little. After all, if you have a serious drama, who cares about the clothes?
It's horrible when people are only interested in buying labels, because it doesn't bring them the happiness they think it will.
Women often don't want to admit that they like fashion. And yet fashion enthralls everyone, from the taxi driver to the mega-intellectual. I have often asked myself why this is. I don't know the answer.
I like to be useful to people.
To have to be sexy? That I hate. To be outrageously sexy? That I love.
Before I had kids, I was out every night of the week.
You want to be understood by the sophisticated few but you also have to be more loud somehow, otherwise your message doesn't go through.
It's what I say all the time to my girls in the office here: The more they dress for sex, the less they will have love or sex.
I would say that clothes are an excuse for living in the world.
We, as designers, have a job with so many possibilities and connections. We are connected to so many different portals, from art to movies to music to design. Fashion is always evolving. Actually, the field is huge. I don't think there is another profession that is so open to so many possibilities.
I always have this idea to create and display activities somewhere else around the world, but in fact it's been very difficult since the start, as you have to find the right place that can represent, or could be as significant as, your ideals. It rarely happens.
Fashion is instant language.
Fashion fosters cliches of beauty, but I want to tear them apart.
I don't believe in people who think that clothes are not important.
For me, art is about learning and about living with people. It's alive.
Clothes can be important. I am learning this. For instance, often when I design and I wonder what is the point, I think of someone having a bad time in their life.
You have to always work against what you did before, and even against your taste.
I remember being mad about having pink and red shoes. I gew up envying other girls' pink and red shoes.
You cannot do something just for the money. You have to do things you believe in and eventually you will make money.
The only way to do something in depth is to work hard.
I always believe in doing new things and using new materials that I have never used or that I didn't like for a long time.
I try to make women feel more powerful without losing their femininity.
I like getting older and being the person who people ask for help.
I always wanted to be different. I always wanted to be first.
Every day I'm thinking about change.
I realized that so many clever people respect fashion so much.
One's life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.
I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.
Girls throw away so much energy in this search for beauty and sexiness.
I once tried to make lace - which has been a great obsession of women - unsexy. And I achieved it.
The power of the media is really the only new issue in the last 50 years, probably.
Prada is something that should be so mundane, like clothes.
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.
Many of us grew up with a kind of puritanism against shopping. But shopping can be much more than how it is cast. If you are bored or you have problems, it can be a way of lifting your spirits, by doing something light and superficial. Why not?
The content could be done anyplace, but the real invention is the architecture. The architecture is the only work that really defines a new way of doing things. I think this point is fundamental.
The fashion world is very active and generous, despite the fact that it is not very well respected - or at least not as much as it should be.
Craziness in a shoe is great - you can have much more freedom, you can exaggerate and it doesn't feel stupid. But to have too much craziness near your face, that would just feel weird.
Ugly is attractive. Ugly is exciting.
I would say there is no Prada woman. I'm interested in women in general. I don't have any kind of preference.
My learning process is by eye alone it's not at all scientific.
The trouble is, most people are not so generous. Everybody wants love for themselves. I hear this all the time from the women I work with. I hear them say, "I want, I want." I never hear them saying what they want to give.
Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I'm attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually.
I don't believe that anyone is not bothered by critics. I think that everybody cares.
My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.
What people sometimes interpret as quirky is my attempt to subvert the concept of luxury by introducing elements that are considered ordinary or commonplace.
Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.
I just hate talking about myself.
I suppose I felt guilty not to be doing something more important, more political. So in a way I am trying to use the company for these other activities.
The only way to do something in depth is to work hard. The moment you start being in love with what you're doing, and thinking it's beautiful or rich, then you're in danger.
I have to say that my husband and my children are so tough, there really is no space for pretension.
Men are always much more dignified than most women.
Fashion is an instant language.
The younger generations have their own ideas, they have their own projects. When they talk, I am always surprised how much more lucid and cultivated they are and how they see things in a way that is much more complex than, for example, other generations did.
I love clothes. Maybe I can say I don't love fashion, but I love clothes completely.
This is an example of hypocrisy
If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing. In fact, most of my work is concerned with destroying—or at least deconstructing—conventional ideas of beauty, of the generic appeal of the beautiful, glamorous, bourgeois woman. Fashion fosters clichés of beauty, but I want to tear them apart.
I am interested in communicating with the world by selling to many people.
Now, I'm not saying I'm fashionable, but there are sociological interests that matter to me, things that are theoretical, political, intellectual and also concerned with vanity and beauty that we all think about but that I try to mix up and translate into fashion.
My family was too serious. They didn't take care of me - it was a very serious and severe life. Not severe in a bad way; just boring - like totally neutral. I felt no emotion.
I wanted to try to push some freedom into the men's clothes.
In America many things that are interesting are seen as odd.
I am in a key moment. I kind of understand that I have to use my work more completely without being ashamed.
Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop.
I do what I think is right.
I'm not interested in types. I'm interested in archetypes.
Because of the Prada name, I can do things that people normally would not care about in the culture. I can have an exhibit by some forgotten artist who I love, and because it's Prada, people will come see it.
What you wear represents you to the world, especially now, when communication between people is so fast. Fashion is a universal language that everyone understands.
When you want to do something that is challenging or interesting or new, you never find the place. All the places are obvious or old or generic. And so you realize that the role of architecture is fundamental.
With women, the more unhappy they are, the more undressed they are.
I hate the idea that you shouldn't wear something just because you're a certain age.
If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing.
I want to confront myself. I challenge and doubt myself. Basically, what I don't like is to get bored.
I think more and more, if you live in the current world - and live internationally - it's all a mix of interests, and the same people who are interested in fashion are also interested in movies, art, and culture.
Sex and the City is the opposite of dignity. You have to have dignity for your body - this is with men and women.
I don't like things that are obvious and so I always try to introduce something that is wrong, something that is different. Just beauty by itself is too easy.
