Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) was a pioneering French fashion designer who founded the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house in 1961 with Pierre Bergé. Renowned for his innovative and daring designs, he revolutionized women’s fashion with iconic creations like the tuxedo jacket for women and the Mondrian dress. YSL played a key role in popularizing ready-to-wear fashion and challenging traditional gender norms in clothing. Throughout his career, he received numerous awards and became the first living designer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. Yves Saint Laurent’s legacy persists, and the YSL brand continues to be a symbol of elegance and sophistication in the fashion world.
Yves Saint Laurent Quotes
1. “Fashions fade, style is eternal.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
2. “Dressing is a way of life.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
3. “Without elegance of the heart, there is no elegance.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
4. “The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who haven’t had the fortune of finding this happiness, I am there.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
5. “I was born with a nervous breakdown.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
6. “The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
7. “I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
8. “Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
9. “To be beautiful, woman enough to have a black sweater, black skirt and walk arm in arm with the man she loves.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
10. “When you feel good in a clothing anything can happen. A good clothing is a passport for happiness.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
11. “Finding your own style is not easy, but once found it brings complete happiness. It gives you self-confidence, always.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
12. “My name will be written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysees.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
13. “Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”
— Yves Saint Laurent
14. “Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
15. “I have always believed that fashion was not only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
16. “Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”
— Yves Saint Laurent
17. “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
18. “Fashion is defined by what later becomes out of fashion.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
19. “For me, perfume, must be adapted to fashion, not the other way around.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
20. “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity – all I hope for in my clothes.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
21. “For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion. Fashions come and go, but style is forever.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
22. “No more rules, the freedom of dressing. The beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
23. “I don’t really like knees.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
24. “A good model can advance fashion by ten years.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
25. “Elegance and beauty have been banished.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
26. “Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!”
— Yves Saint Laurent
27. “Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don’t burn your wings.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
28. “Anyone who reaches for great expression has to be careful of the ridiculous.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
29. “I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
30. “Chanel freed women, and I empowered them.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
31. “I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me – a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
32. “Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation, If, in ready-to-wear, a garment is manufactured according to standard sizes, the haute couture garment adapts to any imperfection in order to eliminate it.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
33. “What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
34. “I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it’s worth I did it.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
35. “We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
36. “The street and me is a love story. 1971 is a great date because, finally, fashion took to the street.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
37. “I am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
38. “I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
39. “I’m so secluded. Very alone.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
40. “It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic by fashion.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
41. “Decadence attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society’s struggle between life and death is absolutely beautiful.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
42. “Fashion is like a party. Getting dressed is preparing to play a role.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
43. “I cannot pretend to do sculpture and make a woman the ridiculous pedestal of my pretensions. To render clothing poetic, yes – but one must preserve its dignity as clothing.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
44. “I don’t at all search for an ideal woman, but several ideal women.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
45. “I want to thank all the women who have worn my clothes, the famous and the unknown, who have been so faithful to me and given me so much joy.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
46. “I’d really like to be in closer contact with life. I’m a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
47. “I couldn’t love a woman who inspired me to be totally disinterested. If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
48. “I love women. I love all the bright and attractive people and things of this world, the flame and also the moth, the dancer and the dance.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
49. “I adore America. It’s an extraordinary country. A new country.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
50. “Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
51. “A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
52. “Each model I have represents a type of ideal women to me.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
53. “I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
54. “There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
55. “There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion and if I hadn’t shown them I would never have arrived at this point in fashion, you see.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
56. “I tried to show that fashion is an art. For that, I followed the counsel of my master Christian Dior and the imperishable lesson of Mademoiselle Chanel. I created for my era and I tried to foresee what tomorrow would be.”
— Yves Saint Laurent
