Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We as a country are very good at responding to acute, short-term crises. When the crisis becomes chronic, we tend to withdraw.
Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn’t.
I've always believed that fashion is not just what you look like on the outside, it's a reflection of who you are on the inside.
When you sit around at dinner talking about the death penalty, it's hard to find relevance in what color shoes will be next season.
When I started this business, my job was to sell people on my brand and convince them to embrace it in a way that made sense to them.
We will redo a shoe 15 times before we get it right, to get it where it should be and hopefully it will fit and look the way it should.
When I started this business, I never anticipated this would become a platform for me to talk about things that I personally believe in.
Not taking those few moments in the morning to decide what you're saying to people by how you're choosing to dress is a lost opportunity.
Often people ask me about getting involved in service and philanthropy, and my first advice is: Make sure it's real and it's transparent.
I wanted to make the brand cool again. I needed to make it a little smaller to make it bigger and I needed to change the consumer experience.
Our business is fashion, and it's about timing and in our case, it's about being relevant and there's nothing more relevant than current affairs.
I came to realize that the law is about a book of rules, and he who learns them best, and is the most creative in interpreting them, goes furthest.
In my opinion, being able to do some form of service is a gift. The one that provides the service is the greatest beneficiary - I will attest to it.
Today, I believe everybody's their own brand, and everybody has their own brand and they curate their own brand on their Facebook and Twitter pages.
For years, the company was known as a women's shoe company. Then we added men's clothing, shirts and shoes, and people thought of us as a men's brand.
After working with my father for two years, we started Candie's, a line of imported shoes from Italy. Then in 1982 I set out to start my own business.
None of what I do is political. My messages are social and human messages. In many cases, they've been politicized but they are so much bigger than that.
Important moments like this are time to reflect. To remind us, sometimes, that it's not only important what you wear, but it's also important to be aware.
There are many in the AIDS community who have said we won't find a cure in the foreseeable future. Well, you certainly won't find it if you're not looking.
In the fashion business, there weren't any rules. In fact, the better you were at creating something new, the greater the likelihood you would be successful.
It is astounding how evolved and progressed India has become. It is holding on to its extraordinary rich culture and becoming global and Western at the same time.
It's very hard to argue against the message that we all have AIDS. It's not hard to make the case that we all have been affected, both culturally and spiritually.
I don't know what Galliano was thinking. Apparently he dressed people as homeless and sent them down the runway. That's not very tasteful and somewhat exploitive.
I'm actually in the process of running from office. I've got so much access and ability to do so much great social outreach and public service as a private person.
You can't build a fashion business with a short-term perspective, unless you're prepared to make investments that you know are not going to pay dividends immediately.
I've struggled with that over the years: Is fashion relevant? Is it frivolous? Is it trivial? Because I give so much of my essence to it, as do everybody I work with.
People have a whole lot more choices than they've had in the past, and I have only earned the right to be considered - every day I have to earn the right to be chosen.
It's not about me, it's about you, the customer. And if I am effective in making what I do about you, and I can enhance you and elevate you, you will support me forever.
Every day when a man or woman gets dressed, they are in effect defining who they are. That daily clean slate is a time in our lives when we can determine who we want to be.
I've always believed that how you look is a self-fulfilling prophecy: When you wake up, get dressed and look in the mirror, if you think you look good, most likely you will.
I am probably not the best creative person in the industry. I am probably not the best business person in the industry. But by nature being both, I think, is a strategic advantage.
The stigma, the fact that nobody was talking about AIDS was arguably killing more people than the virus itself. So I did an ad about the fact that nobody was speaking about HIV/AIDS.
If every shoe store in America stops selling shoes, no one's going to go barefoot for 15, 20 years. No one needs shoes, for the most part. We have shoes; our problem is what to do with them.
To the degree you could provoke people and engage them in a unique way, your message is more likely to resonate longer. I figured out the less-than-140-character concept long before Twitter came along.
I think the power of messaging is saying something in as few words as possible, because I think we all essentially have ADD. It's not a clinically diagnosed state anymore; it's a socially imposed state.
Through my ongoing work as a UNAIDS Ambassador and with the End AIDS Coalition, I remain personally committed to aligning resources and galvanizing global action and working with amfAR to make AIDS history.
I am the closest of all to my wife, who is in and of herself a change agent and has committed to impacting the realities of homelessness - and making sure I get out of the house every day to do what I have to do.
There are only so many things we can do that make us feel better. We pick up the newspapers and we want to cry every day. We turn on the news and we want to jump out the first window, jump in front of the first truck.
It's hard to ignore the hand that feeds you, and today our communities are far more needy than they've ever been, and governments neither have the will nor the ability in many cases to provide the services that they need to.
Everybody struggles to find a balance between their personal lives and their professional lives, and in some cases, their connection with the community. So what I've looked to do over the years is marry as many of those as I can.
Asking people for money is a hard thing to do. But helping people do the right thing is not hard. So I often call people up and suggest ways they can spend their money to make a meaningful impact, and I don't feel I've asked them for money.
Every day, we all make the critical decision of what we're going to wear, because many of the people we encounter in a day don't get to know anything more about us than how we present ourselves. That decision - totally on our own terms - is a powerful one.
I always believe that if you're looking at a magazine and I'm one of 40 ads, I - in effect - get one-fortieth of your attention. But if, when you close that magazine, you're still thinking about my ad, I've got a lot more than one-fortieth of your attention.
My job, I believe, is to convince you to allow me to be part of your brand. Then when you look to present yourself a certain way you'll come to me, go to our website, and you'll buy want you want in the color you want, in the size you want, for the season you want.
Over the years, I have found a way to use this business and this platform to talk with people about important issues. To the degree you can bring a sense of purpose to what you do, it makes the relationship with the customer that much more meaningful and purposeful.
I'm sure some people haven't necessarily embraced some of the messages over the years. We've been talking about the inappropriateness of automatic weapons and guns since the late Eighties. I know we've lost some customers over the years, and in some ways, secured others.
I've come to realize that, with social media today, people consume fashion very differently than they ever have before - they post it, tweet it, "like" it, retweet it. Today, people define themselves by a collection of various elements in their lives that they connect to.
Very early on in this journey, I uniquely found not just an aesthetic, but also a voice. I found the ability to communicate with people, which has turned out for me to be a far more meaningful platform. To talk to them about not just what's on their body, but also on their minds.
I had left the runway because I had come to believe that it was questionably relevant and appropriate, because we were creating clothes that, to a large degree, never ended up making it to the stores. And the runway was being seen in markets where those clothes weren't available.
When I was younger I would often go to nightclubs and sit in the best-lit corner to look at what people chose to wear, or I'd go out and around the city - to places where people express their sense of what they think looks good. So, I get a sense of that, and then I try to interpret it.