Design Quotes

I love the creative outlet of designing, and I love make-up and products and feel like I find so many great products around the world that I want to recreate, so I want to do that or design.

Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze - just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they're all 'Made in Italy.' We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians.

Books are the heart of any home, and I spend hours going through books for design inspiration.

When I take on a design project, I have to jet from the bookstore to the hardware shop to the lamp store and back again just to collect a small portion of the many items I need to fill a home. But, when you hit the flea market, they're all right there. From booth to booth, you have the bases covered.

I didn't grow up thinking I'd be a decorator. Design is my greatest passion, and it naturally just pulled me down the path. Same with TV. Being famous or having a show was never the motivation. I got a call and was swept up by the challenge of that first small space redesign.

First and foremost, I'm a decorator and product designer. Everything I do, the television shows, the books, that comes from the design work. It's what I love.

Design, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school.

Brizo has been my single biggest sponsor since I began as a designer. Brizo wanted to be involved in many different areas of design - they had already worked with several architects, and fashion was an area they were interested in moving into.

I came from product design originally - I had been designing dolls for a toy company since I was 16 - so I'm used to working with plastic and different things. I had an innate interest in objects.

There is always going to be that luxury customer out there. I have clients who buy $10,000 dresses and clients who buy $60 dresses. It's not so much about the money. Design is a mentality.

My vision is the ability to design clothes for a man who wants to create his own style and doesn't want to dress like he's in uniform, to look like the guy in the ad, or to feel like he has to put it together that way.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

There's a perennial debate about whether the propagandistic tripe produced by establishment media outlets is shaped more by evil or by stupidity. Personally, I think it's both: a healthy dose of each is needed. The system design is malicious, while those who serve as its public face are generally vacant.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

Architects design buildings; that's what we do, so we have to go with the flow; and, even though I'm still an old Leftie, global capitalism does have its good side. It's broken down barriers - the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union - it's raised a lot of people up economically, and for architects, it has meant that we can work around the world.

The dynamics of film directing and fashion design - in the ways that I've done it - were not dissimilar.

As a designer, design director or any creative person, you have to hire great people, support them and make them feel comfortable so they can contribute and give you their best.

There are many designers who have much greater talent as a designer than I do, but they may not have my drive, they may not work as hard, they may not have the focus, the desire... You have to have a talent because, at the end of the day, if the pants you design don't make someone's butt look great, they're not going to buy them.

My actual first summer internship was in the design department of Clinique.

Each season I strive to design a forward-thinking and effortless collection with a very clean minimalist aesthetic.