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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Suzy Menkes Quotes

If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.

– Suzy Menkes

I was trained as journalist never to use the word ‘I,’ never to put my own opinion there. In fact, if you had a dollar or a euro for every time I use the word ‘I,’ you would be a poor person. But this is not true in general. I like the idea of being able to stand away and make a judgement.

– Suzy Menkes

There is something sad about clothes laid in a tomb of trunks.

– Suzy Menkes

The clothes most worn by people are the clothes least commented on by the press.

– Suzy Menkes

I think there’s too much mixing fashion and intellect. Fashion ultimately is designed to cover the human body, to give you joy, to make you feel better. I don’t think it has to have a great intellectual meaning.

– Suzy Menkes

Smartphones are so fabulous in so many ways that it seems daft to be nostalgic about the days when an image did not go round the world in a nanosecond.

– Suzy Menkes

My clothes are fabulous – colourful, fun and by some very special designers. They deserve a better life than being sleeping beauties in a bed of tissue inside a trunk.

– Suzy Menkes

There is no doubt that online shopping has fed the craze for speed, because when you can’t touch the fabric or try on the outfit, the only emotion you experience is the excitement of the purchase and the thrill of beating everyone else to it.

– Suzy Menkes

Clothes are like friends.

– Suzy Menkes

With the traditional six-month lead time on the delivery of international show content, designer collections can be outpaced by the so-called fast fashion chains. H&M, Topshop and Zara, or even Target and J. Crew, would have their versions for sale before the designer looks hit the stores.

– Suzy Menkes

Who needs to graduate from Central Saint Martins in London or New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology when a homemade outfit can go viral on YouTube with millions of hits?

– Suzy Menkes

I am thrilled to become international ‘Vogue’ editor at Conde Nast International, which has a real commitment to journalistic excellence, and to have the opportunity to write for a wider global audience through the ‘Vogue’ websites.

– Suzy Menkes

In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was convinced that my working life was changing for the better.

– Suzy Menkes

I knew him, but never felt that I got really close to Saint Laurent. But who really did? Betty Catroux, maybe.

– Suzy Menkes

The way that people dress makes them part of an army, dressed in their own uniform, determined to do something.

– Suzy Menkes

I am grateful to have spent 25 years at the ‘International Herald Tribune’ – a newspaper where I had unstinting support in being able to express myself freely and honestly.

– Suzy Menkes

The clothes that fire up my emotions are colorful and ‘different’ pieces. My eye still picks out gilded-cloque glamour from among Burberry’s streamlined trench coats or a hand-printed coat from Dries Van Noten.

– Suzy Menkes

I don’t really believe in elegance. Ever since I first came to France many years ago to do the Chambre Syndicale course, I always felt I was somehow lacking, first of all being British – obviously a disaster! But I was also puzzled with this idea that you have to tie your Hermes scarf just right, or you can only wear black.

– Suzy Menkes

I think there’s a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it’s only fashion, that in the end it’s only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions.

– Suzy Menkes

Change is good; it’s what fashion is all about.

– Suzy Menkes

Nan Kempner wore one of the first Saint Laurent trouser suits to one of those fancy Madison Avenue restaurants and was denied access. She famously took off her pants and walked in wearing only the jacket. And it was that kind of revolution that was echoed in fashion and in life.

– Suzy Menkes

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I’m sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don’t you? Once they get their first retrospective, it’s really hard for them to push ahead.

– Suzy Menkes

My style has always been to choose the charming and quirky.

– Suzy Menkes

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

– Suzy Menkes

As the fashion carousel spins ever faster, the concern is that, while the stream of newness never runs out, there’s going to be a good deal more crash and burn among designers in the future.

– Suzy Menkes

Only the fat-cat corporations can really afford to put on two mega-ready-to-wear shows a year, or four if you add two haute couture shows, or six if you count men’s wear. Resort and prefall push the number up to eight. A couple of promotional shows in Asia, Brazil, Dubai or Moscow can bring the count to 10.

– Suzy Menkes