Hedi Slimane quotes:

David Bowie, for me, was the butchest guy in town. Jagger was like a truck driver.

I don't like the collusion between high fashion design and high street. You have to know where you stand. I belong to luxury fashion. That's what I've always felt and embraced. I like the best quality, the best fabrics and the most creative field in fashion. I will stay consistent. I belong to this world.

I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood.

I always loved designing, but the context needs to be right, and have a positive perspective.

I love California. It has such a strong contribution to the history of culture, and popular culture. For better and worse, of course. Even the worst can be interesting to some degree sometimes for somebody creative.

Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness.

[It's] not one thing this year, one thing another year.

The iPad needs to catch up with Flash before I put a hand on it.

Music defines decades, and quite clearly shapes the rhythm, vitality of fashion, attitude and social behaviors. The anthology, just like most of my work, from photography to fashion design, is about and around music.

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.

Hedi was and is still misspelled 'Heidi,' and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age.

Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.

I'm going to design again, but I come back when it's the right project, so I keep my passion for it intact.

My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead.

Music has shaped men's fashion, and transposed in a playful and witty manner its riding or military heritage. It is difficult to figure out who leads, but music and fashion are connected genetically.

In the future, fast-fashion retailers might change their philosophy toward real efforts to create a world of their own. One can only hope.

People always want an explanation about everything and I cannot give it to them. Because I don't know myself. 'Why did you do a pair of pants like that?' I have no idea. I'm not going to have a 20-minute political discussion about the necessity for slashed, painted leather jeans. Basically, I don't know more than you.

I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.

I shared this idea that fashion starts with a movement, an allure: elusive, defined through perfect proportions.

I'm so personally attached to all the characters I met and photographed over the years ... the anthology is like a photographic reliquary that could potentially preserve their grace, fierce joy, and restlessness.

I like the idea of paradox, between the authentic fabrics and sophisticated shapes and between masculine and feminine. I'm not so much for sportswear. I think it's over.

Fashion somehow, for me, is purely and happily irrational.

I like it to stay very organic, and to remember a personal story behind all my subjects.

With the rise of the Internet, fashion did become part of the global entertainment industry in the last ten years, and will follow the digital evolution of the music or film industry.

I thought I should work more on the idea that you wear a suit or a jacket because of the fun it can provide, because it's a game, because it might even have a sexual quality.

An athletic man, or whatever you want to call him, will only look good in a very classic suit, a pair of classic jeans, athletic clothes or simply naked. Forget fashion. This is not going to happen, unless you want to look like a Chippendales dancer in designer clothes.

I discovered Los Angeles in the late 90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.

I have a great admiration and tenderness for Azzedine Alaia. I haven't seen him in a while, but I guess he must be still sewing some dresses at night.

I presume my work has also always been about reduction without any distraction or after effects, outside emotions, or intimacy or complicity with the subject ...

I started as a black-and-white teenage photographer, and I'm still there decades after. In some ways, the genre is almost gone. I am thinking of true, stubborn, lifetime black-and-white photographers, as opposed to black-and-white as a photographic commodity.

I'd like men to think about evolving into something more sophisticated, more seductive. To explore the possibility of an entirely new masculinity.

I've always done the style that I loved, so I didn't mind sending an old pair of jeans down the runway. It's about that style. It's not Hedi Slimane. You know, I'm not all that familiar with his thing-I really don't look. I certainly know who he is.

Men are not supposed to be mysterious. That's what you say about women. But I think men can have a little of it, too.

Men's fashion has a certain heaviness in the fabrics and construction. But also there is a heaviness in the mentality.

Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.

Music has shaped men's fashion and transposed in a playful and witty manner its riding or military heritage. It is difficult to figure out who leads but music and fashion are connected genetically.

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

The framework of men's wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.

The perfect integrity of The NewYork Times, and its writers, is not precisely 'just silly nonsense,'

Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives.

Vulnerability is beautiful to me. There might be a need to fabricate your own beauty paradigms. I guess I never quite bought into any kind of 'standard'.

I'm most interested in that moment when my entire perspective changes, and I have to reconsider everything.