Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.
Coco ChanelRead
Yves Saint Laurent is a young man of excellent taste; the more he copies me the more taste he displays.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Coco Chanel suggests that imitation, when done well, can highlight one's taste and style.
In this quote, Coco Chanel emphasizes that true taste and style can often be recognized through the admiration and imitation of others' work. Yves Saint Laurent's borrowing of her designs is not seen as a lack of originality, but rather as a testament to his aesthetic sensibility, showing that acknowledging influences can enrich one's own creative expression.
Themes
ImitationTasteFashionInfluenceArt
In practice
Example use cases
During a fashion seminar discussing the importance of influences in art and design.
More from Coco Chanel
All quotes →Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.
Coco ChanelRead
Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.
Coco ChanelRead
You can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.
Coco ChanelRead
Elegance does not consist in putting on a new dress.
Coco ChanelRead
Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress.
Coco ChanelRead
Similar quotes
I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
Sylvia PlathRead
You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
Cab CallowayRead
The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
Bob DylanRead
I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
Joel MeyerowitzRead
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
Nicole KraussRead
Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
Isadora DuncanRead