Riccardo Tisci quotes:

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  • Couture was only for rich people. Givenchy was for rich people. A bag cost 5,000 euro; a coat cost 10,000 euro. In the beginning, I couldn't react. I was just working like a machine, because I wanted to make the house happy.

  • Couture is more your own world, they come and buy head-to-toe - they buy the jewelry, bags, coats, dresses, bodies underneath.... But couture is not dead - it's taken another shape.

  • I love art and music more than I love fashion, to be honest,

  • My definition of beauty is something between extremely ugly and extremely fantastic.

  • At the beginning, I didn't see what Givenchy could give my career. It was like, "Okay, I'll do it for the money for a few years to help my mom and my sisters."

  • Couture is emotion. Couture is freedom. Couture is not thinking about pricing and not thinking about craziness. You can do whatever you want to do in couture.

  • I remember that my sisters gave me this beautiful, like, empty book for Christmas. And I would draw all these beautiful women. Most of the time it was mermaids and a Minotaur: half human, half animal. I used to be obsessed with Minotaurs when I was a child.

  • Seduction is about intelligence and wit. Someone who makes me laugh has every chance to seduce me.

  • I didn't have many friends. I was very shy ... And, then, even worse, when I was 14 I became Gothic. I had long, black hair. I was going to school with makeup. Because I was trying to find my language, to scream to the world that I felt so closed in a box where I was living.

  • Anything I do, I do with my heart. This is why I sometimes get very upset or sometimes get very personal when I'm working.

  • Black is always elegant. It is the most complete colour in the whole world, made of all the colours in the palette.

  • Even though I had a fantastic family, I always felt lonely - not lonely in the melancholic way but knowing that, to really survive, I have to do everything for myself. I had to work and study, and I was out in the street really surviving, bringing food back home.

  • Every two to three weeks, I was changing around my room. My room was made out of nothing, basically - a magazine, a little radio, a little bed - and I had the sensibility to put things together and match things in a certain way so that they were very special.

  • For me, darkness is something very beautiful,

  • I always think about the streets because that's where I come from and that's where I'm going to die one day. That is my life.

  • I am interested in beauty when it has something special and mysterious.

  • I believe that couture is not about shocking.

  • I brought a lot of the codification of womenswear to menswear. Why? Because when I was a child, I was wearing women's clothes adjusted to me.

  • I can give a beautiful present, and that may change the lives of people around me.

  • I come from a very poor family, with sisters. I never really knew my father, so I miss this strong image of a man in my life.

  • I didn't invent hot water. But when I approach menswear, I do it in a very honest way. And my menswear and womenswear are very similar, in the sense that I put men in leggings and lace shirts.

  • I didn't know I was going to become a designer; I was going to become a successful person, but I really wanted to be free.

  • I do the final fitting because the client wants me there. They're not spoilt, they really understand that you're very busy, but they just want you to say what you think - for just ten minutes. They really want to know your opinion because it really is a service at the end of the day, a luxury service.

  • I had only two girlfriends. I didn't have many friends because I was staying at home and dreaming - drawing and dreaming.

  • I like when a man has one strong accessory. If it's a watch, it has to be major. If you have strong shoes, it should just be the shoes. I don't like when a man is overdone-that's just bad taste. Coco Chanel was always saying you have to watch yourself in the mirror, put on a lot of things, and then take them off. I think it should be that way for men as well.

  • I started to draw and design clothes that I couldn't find, because everything was all luxury, fashion clothes or very straight. So I mixed all of that together: Who says I can't put a man in a skirt? Who says that a man can't wear lace? Who says that men can't wear Swarovski? Who says that men can't wear makeup? You know what I'm like; for me, straight, gay, women, men, trans, we're all the same. I don't see difference.

  • I suffered a lot when there was, like, a birthday party and I was not invited. Not because I was ugly or stupid; I was not invited because the parents would say to the kids, "Don't invite him, because he's poor and he comes from the south of Italy, and he can't give you nothing."

  • I think my heart is in a very good place. And I think this is why I'm achieving what I've been asking to do in the universe for so long.

  • I tried to never exclude people. I know what it means to be left out.

  • I try to destroy taboo in fashion-which is something I learned as a kid. I come from the street, and you have to be a survivor,

  • I used to hate to go to school, because when it was Friday afternoon and everybody was finished school, I knew I was going to work Saturday and Sunday.

  • I was a very nice boy. I was well-educated ... very Catholic family. So I was very respectful, never late at work. I was always the last one to leave. It's always been that way in my life.

  • I was the last one of nine kids - eight girls and me last - and my sisters were going out. They were teenagers. And as they were getting ready, I would sit on the bathtub and watch them put on makeup and transform themselves - you know, putting on clothes and giggling about the boys they were going to meet and everything. So for me, that was an amazing thing - the fact of transforming themselves.

  • I'm very faithful to myself. When you do things that are true it just comes out quite instinctively.

  • If you buy a Cartier ring you want people to know it is a Cartier ring or a diamond, or a piece of art that's giving an emotion - then people read it and say, "wow that's really amazing". With prêt-à-porter you see people in the street, in a club, in a restaurant or whatever, and you think, "Oh my god, he's wearing my trousers!" In a way it's more open - people can put together the way they want - mixed with other designers.

  • I'm very well off but I can stay with normal people. I can do a super-luxury life, but I can do a very normal life and I'm not scared.

  • In Italy, especially in '70s and '80s, there was a lot of racism between north and south. And my mom immigrated from the south to the north, from Puglia, the heel of Italy. But what made me feel different was society, not my family.

  • In prêt-à-porter now we understandably need to make the collection satisfy the big market more, so couture is extra special.

  • In the beginning I didn't want to do a menswear collection. It felt a little forced. And then I found that it was an amazing world.

  • In the beginning, I was very punk. I was very revolutionary. When they asked me to do Givenchy, I didn't want to do it. My friends pushed me. But the situation with my family was so bad financially. I really did it because, when they told me how much they would pay me, I saw that my sisters and my mom could have a better life.

  • In the beginning, to be honest I was super-scared. I turned up and took a step back and said, 'I am here to learn,' and I feel the same today. I've got only to learn from these people because they have been doing couture for 30 or 40 years, so I keep learning every season.

  • I've always been obsessed with things that are half animal and half human - like mermaids and Minotaurs - because they are trapped in an animal body. And I felt trapped in my own life.

  • I've got what I want, and I've got the luck to express myself and to be paid and to do what I do as a creative person.

  • I've had this sensibility since I was a child. If there was a black boy in the school, I was the friend. If there was an effeminate guy, I was the friend. If there was somebody who was poor like me, I was the friend.

  • My friends were like, "Oh, this weekend, we're going to go shopping." "Oh, this weekend I'm going to go to see the judo champion" ... you know. And I couldn't do anything.

  • My life has changed financially and I have a name, but I try to never forget people on my journey.

  • My mom always said to us, "You cannot judge anybody because of the color of skin." There were a lot of African immigrants in Italy at the time, and people would not even say hi in the street. And my mom, she would invite these people to the house. This is what I got from my mom: to not judge people because of their sexuality, their skin color, their religion, nothing.

  • My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life.

  • My mom didn't teach me about Marco Polo. She didn't teach me about Napoleon. She didn't teach me about any of that. But she did teach me how to survive and to be a good person. And you need to be a strong woman to do that. She's the biggest person in my life. She's my Virgin Maria. That's why I love religion so much.

  • My obsession when I was kid, from '85 into the '90s, was Gianni Versace. It was Helmut Lang. It was Margiela. So I said, "I cannot have Givenchy only as a luxury house; I'm going to introduce products for everybody, things that are reachable."

  • My relationship with religion is very strong because it was my hope, and it gave me two things very important in my life. It gave me the belief and it gave me a point to reach: Don't do something bad to the people next to you.

  • No matter how much people in fashion think we're so cool and avant-garde, for most fashion people, creativity is quite taboo.

  • One thing my mom didn't want any of us to do was to cry or to complain about life. Every day and night, even when we didn't have much food, we would pray together. And that for me was a beautiful moment. The fact of being poor didn't really hurt me.

  • People's wardrobes in history are something that society and culture imposed. But sexuality is not about the way you dress.

  • Religion and love don't have a price, don't have a gender, a skin color, nothing. We are all on the same plate.

  • The aborigines in Australia, the way they dress is very honest; it's not about: "Oh, you wear a skirt, you're gay."

  • The couture client wants the latest things, but she wants the clothes to be super-special - the fabrics won't even touch or go near anything like prêt-à-porter.

  • There was a loneliness because kids my age had video games, tennis. They traveled. They had beautiful clothes. I was wearing my sisters' old clothes that were adjusted on me, because we didn't have money to buy clothes. So that really made me go deep inside on my heart, because the only things I could have with me were my heart and my brain.

  • These five years as a couturier have really changed my way of seeing fashion and my confidence with fashion. Couture is a dream.

  • This is very much part of my style, I work a lot on the back - I love the back of clothes for men. I love even T-shirts printed behind. I think, "Why do you want to show only the front?"

  • This is why I decided to work with Nike, too, because it is even more mass-market than Givenchy and could make entry-price shoes and make people dream to be part of the journey.

  • To leave Italy at 17 without money and go to a country like England is very rare; Italians stay with the family until 30, 35. But I couldn't stand to live in this box anymore. I was getting bigger, and the box was getting smaller.

  • We didn't have a television, so we sat around the table, and me and my sisters and my mom would do these jobs, like, a penny for a piece, you know, these paper jobs. You know, what really saved me as a human today is my sisters and my mom.

  • When I do a show I have such high emotion; the energy is amazing - but, people don't really see the details and the work and the experimentation that we, the designers, put into the clothes. With prêt-à-porter you're having a look.

  • When I started at 9, I was working with plaster. I worked with a florist. It was a little illegal for kids to work. They would give you tips because they couldn't really give you wages.

  • When I was 12, I used to dress as a woman in the house. At the time, cross-dressing was a big taboo in Italy. It was better to have a son who was a drug addict than a cross-dresser.

  • When I was far away, when I prayed every night, I felt I was very near with my heart, with my brain, to my sisters and my mom.

  • When I was young, especially when I was at school, I thought couture was about big gowns, big hats (that is couture as well, of course) - but my couture is about going near the clothes and having a look at the details. I like people to have a shock in a chic way.

  • With couture you have faithfulness - people are faithful to you. In couture, you will see that the cut looks like a lace dress from a distance, but it's only when you get nearer you understand that it's layers of lace, hand stitched in a certain shape, all the work - the zips, the buttons, the hooks... it goes on.

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