Karl Lagerfeld Quotes

1. Yes, some people say to me you're too skinny, but never a skinny person says that to me, only people who could lose a few pounds say that.




2. I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was.

3. Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.



4. I'm not a marketing person. I don't ask myself questions. I go by instinct.

5. The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.

6. When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - "It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject." This was a very healthy attitude.



7. I like to do things quickly because I'm easily bored.

8. Bling is over. Red carpet covered with rhinestones is out. I call it: "the new modesty."

9. If there's something dangerous, sauces are dangerous for the body.

10. I am not a second option person. It is that or nothing. If it is not the way I see it I prefer not to see it.

11. I never smoked. I never drank and I never took drugs. The funny thing is, nothing is more boring, people like this. For me, it's OK. But most of my friends, at least they smoke and drink.

12. Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

13. Buy clothes the size you want to wear.

14. I'm a working-class person, working with class.

15. But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.

16. In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.


17. Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue.


18. T-shirts for ten dollars are even more fashion today than expensive fashion.

19. In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish.

20. I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.





21. It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

22. I never - you know also one of the things that would save me for a man my age, it was not that easy to lose that much weight and fall down and look like something draped.

23. There's something boring about people who have to go to an office for a living.





24. No. I mean those people really did something for designers I don't think department stores can, could or should do still today. Today the world is different so you have to make it differently. There's TV. There's a lot of things.

25. Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

26. A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

27. Because I stopped dieting already six months ago, and I think it's important to bring out a book like this and you are there a year later and say look, I'm still like this.





28. Black-and-white always looks modern, whatever that word means.

29. Clothes if they are not well cut, you can kill nobody. A building poorly built can kill people. It's a much more difficult work. I would not compare myself with that.

30. Don't overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.


31. Don't dress to kill, dress to survive.


32. For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

33. Foreigners don't want to invest any more in France - and this is not working.

34. Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself.

35. Greece needs to work on a cleaner image. It's a big problem, as they have this reputation of being so corrupt.






36. I always loved advertising. If I hadn't been in fashion, I'd have been in advertising.


37. Fortunately there is more wealth in the world than there was at the time of the global economic crisis of 1929 - Chinese, Indian, Arab and Russian.

38. I can do whatever I want.





39. I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going - I have no post-satisfaction.


40. I am like a TV antenna. I catch everything that is in the air, and then I do it my way.

41. I can hardly eat meat because it has to look like something what it was not when it was alive.

42. I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

43. I can no longer walk in the street. That's over.

44. I do my job like I breathe.

45. I didn't play with other children.

46. I don't do meetings.


47. I don't care if people I admire criticize me because their opinion is valuable to me.


48. I don't know what "normal" means, anyway.

49. I don't want to be on the Internet.

50. I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

51. I don't want to look sloppy, because then I feel sloppy.




52. I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed.

53. I eat fish, three times a week meat, and if not yogurt, something like this and it rarely continues.

54. I hardly went to school.


55. I eat next to nothing.


56. I hate the past - especially my own past.

57. I have more friends in New York than Paris.

58. I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

59. I have no human I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.


60. I have moved to a smaller house in Paris, and I don't fancy having so much staff now.


61. I have now exactly the same weight I had when I was 18, 20.

62. I love dogs, but dogs, you have to be in the country with dogs. I cannot walk a dog on the street.

63. I like the discipline of well-cut, impeccable clothes. I think it's a very healthy discipline.


64. I love to watch times change!

65. I never fall in love.

66. I never drink anything hot; I don't like hot drinks, very strange.


67. I make such big efforts to forget things and I can't tell the story of my life because, thank God, I'm still living it.


68. I never look at my watch when I'm sketching!

69. I never go anywhere. I do sketches and make phone calls, and people visit. It's more fun to come to Paris.

70. I never played with anything like toys.



71. I prefer to be in a video than to play with it.



72. I think for my bones and my size, I better stay with my 60 kilo.

73. I sleep seven hours. If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don't wake up before - the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours.

74. I think it's horrible that people have to be told. Don't smoke! Everybody knows it's bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

75. I think tattoos are horrible. It's like living in a Pucci dress full-time.

76. I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea.

77. I wanted to become an illustrator as a child.






78. I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon.

79. I'm German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn't exist any more.

80. I'm an iPod person.


81. I'm lucky to work in the most perfect of conditions.

82. I'm like a rock singer with one-night stands on the road.

83. I'm not a fortune-teller.

84. I'm totally myself.

85. I'm not an employee who goes to the office every morning at the same time. Then, vacations are needed.

86. If I were a woman, I would love to have lots of kids. But for men, I don't believe in it.


87. I've done many ads because that's my new career. It's an inspiring extension for my mind.


88. Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

89. My childhood was endless - from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

90. It's only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I'm skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I'm big, when I was big, I never thought about it.


91. My mother did not like children.

92. My favorite kitchen was the Japanese and the Italian kitchen.

93. My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn't dare do themselves.

94. My opinion can be completely different after a show.

95. No one wants to see curvy women.

96. No, I never thought I would like cats.

97. No, and I never, ever eat in between the meals. I control it well enough and with no pills, and I sleep seven hours a night. I go to bed. I fall asleep, and I wake up seven hours later, and this is the most important.

98. No, I'm not a French designer either. I'm from nowhere. I'm a European, old European is all I am.

99. Nothing scares me more than people with some doll collection.

100. Oh yes, I love to do shoes. I'm not a fetishist but I love to do shoes.

101. Some people would like me to be round again.

102. Personally, I don't wear fur.

103. People like me were supposed to be into exclusivity, unapproachable. That's what I hate most. I think it's very demode.

104. The brain is a muscle, and I'm a kind of body-builder.

105. Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary.

106. The importance of logo into today's fashion is un! be! Lievable!


107. The first thing I do when I get up, I have breakfast.

108. The story with anorexic girls - nobody works with anorexic girls. That has nothing to do with fashion.

109. The way I talk is bizarre.

110. There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there more than 30 per cent of girls in France - I don't know about England - that are much, much overweight. And it is much more dangerous and very bad for the health.

111. Vanity is the healthiest thing in life.




112. There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

113. What I enjoy most is doing something I've never done before.

114. What I hate is nasty, ugly people.


115. Who buys French cars? Not me.


116. What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

117. What I love best in life is new starts.

118. Work is making a living out of being bored.

119. You cannot be creative with people around you.




120. Why should I stop working? If I do, I'll die and it'll all be finished.

121. You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

122. Be comfortable even in the wedding dress.


123. The only love that I really believe in is a mother's love for her children.


124. We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.

125. Never use the word "cheap". Today everybody can look chic in inexpensive clothes (the rich buy them too). There is good clothing design on every level today. You can be the chicest thing in the world in a T-shirt and jeans - it's up to you.

126. People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can't live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.


127. Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.

128. The woman is the most perfect doll that I have dressed with delight and admiration.


129. Absurdity and anti-absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.

130. The secret to modeling is not being perfect. What one needs is a face that people can identify in a second. You have to be given what's needed by nature, and what's needed is to bring something new.

131. I want everyone to wear what they want and mix it in their own way. That, to me, is what is modern.

132. I like to reinvent myself - it's part of my job.

133. I'm very much down to earth, just not this earth.

134. Luxury is the ease of a t-shirt in a very expensive dress.

135. Fashion and music are the same, because music express its period too.

136. We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It's like hunger and thirst - you need them both.

137. Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

138. When people want to be liked for what they did, they should stop.

139. Stuff your brain with knowledge.

140. Buy what you don't have yet, or what you really want, which can be mixed with what you already own. Buy only because something excites you, not just for the simple act of shopping.

141. Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.

142. Fashion is about going ahead, not about memory.

143. I never touch sugar, cheese, bread…I only like what I'm allowed to like. I'm beyond temptation. There is no weakness. When I see tons of food in the studio, for us and for everybody, for me it's as if this stuff was made out of plastic. The idea doesn't even enter my mind that a human being could put that into their mouth. I'm like the animals in the forest. They don't touch what they cannot eat.

144. The elegance is as physical, as moral quality that has nothing common with the clothing. You can see a countrywoman more elegant than one so called elegant woman.

145. Fashion is neither moral or immoral, but it is for rebuilding the morale.

146. If you stick to something doggedly, you are off to a bad start.

147. Forgiveness isn't something I'm preoccupied with - turning the other cheek isn't my trip.

148. I had an interview once with some German journalist - some horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists - maybe a week after - and she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she said to me: "It's impolite; remove your glasses." I said: "Do I ask you to remove your bra?"

149. Slang is the suitcase of the damned, my dear. CHECK IT.

150. These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly. Fashion is about dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women.

151. I like chocolate. I don't eat it, but I like the smell of it. People can drink with their eyes; I can eat with my nose. I would love to have a perfume based on chocolate.

152. Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.

153. I have a guest house because I don't want people in my home.

154. (on Lady Gaga) She's an Upper West Side girl with real learning. She's not just an idiot from nowhere…There are so many third-rate people now who are more famous than people who should be famous, but sometimes people who could or should be famous are very boring, too.

155. That's why I sleep alone. My hair is curly, and that's why I have my ponytail. I look like a madman, like something out of a horror movie.

156. At Chanel, there are no meetings. At Chanel, we do what we want, whenever we want and it works. And Fendi is the same.


157. (on if he'd ever cut his pony) No, because I'm afraid it won't grow again. And I'm not very gifted for hairdos. This is the quickest thing in the world. It takes less than five seconds.

158. (on doing his own hair) No, I have someone who comes to the house and washes it, puts in the dry shampoo, and takes care if it because I have no time.

159. (on lingerie) I'm not mad for thongs.



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