Top 100 Alexander McQueen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There’s blood beneath every layer of skin.”

— Alexander McQueen

52. “There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do – but that part is for me. It’s my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There’s a sadness to it, but there’s romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.”

— Alexander McQueen

53. “There’s beauty in anger, and anger for me is a passion.”

— Alexander McQueen

54. “Style is not about the clothes, it’s about the individual.”

— Alexander McQueen

55. “I hate it when people romanticize Scotland.”

— Alexander McQueen

56. “People don’t want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination.”

— Alexander McQueen

57. “For a long time I was looking for my perfect equilibrium, my mojo. And now I think I’m getting there: I’ve found my customer, my silhouette, my cut.”

— Alexander McQueen

58. “When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you’re an open book, there’s no allure.”

— Alexander McQueen

59. “For me, what I do is an artistic expression which is channeled through me. Fashion is just the medium.”

— Alexander McQueen

60. “I’m not big on women looking naive.”

— Alexander McQueen

61. “I think the idea of mixing luxury and mass-market fashion is very modern, very now – no one wears head-to-toe designer anymore.”

— Alexander McQueen

62. “British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.”

— Alexander McQueen

63. “I’m about what goes through people’s minds. The stuff that people don’t want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what’s buried in people’s psyches.”

— Alexander McQueen

64. “When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there’s a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off.”

— Alexander McQueen

65. “If you ask any lady they want to be taller, they want to be slimmer, you know, and they want a waist. I’m not here to make people look like a sack of potatoes.”

— Alexander McQueen

66. “For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It’s usually only the intellectual ones who understand what’s going on in what I do.”

— Alexander McQueen

67. “I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. I have to force people to look at things.”

— Alexander McQueen

68. “I work with people I admire and respect. It’s never because of who they are.”

— Alexander McQueen

69. “I believe in that one-on-one sell. I don’t really believe in flooding the market with loads of goods that don’t mean much, and you lose your identity.”

— Alexander McQueen

70. “As a designer, you’ve always got to push yourself forward; you’ve always got to keep up with the trends or make your own trends. That’s what I do.”

— Alexander McQueen

71. “Fame should be left to the film stars.”

— Alexander McQueen

72. “These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn’t be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.”

— Alexander McQueen

73. “If you’re lucky enough to use something you see in a dream, it is purely original. It’s not in the world – it’s in your head. I think that is amazing.”

— Alexander McQueen

74. “You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don’t need to do that any more.”

— Alexander McQueen

75. “I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.”

— Alexander McQueen

76. “I think sometimes I might scare the editors, because they might feel they’re getting old and they’re not understanding it. The problem lies on their side of the fence, not mine. I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era.”

— Alexander McQueen

77. “I’m mad in the front of my mind, but business-minded in the back.”

— Alexander McQueen

78. “I was three years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life.”

— Alexander McQueen

79. “I’m 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I’m dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above earth.”

— Alexander McQueen

80. “I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.”

— Alexander McQueen

81. “It’s not my vision when I cover a woman’s face with a chador. I got the idea from a ‘National Geographic’ photo. I’m just showing their plight in the world.”

— Alexander McQueen

82. “I can’t get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it’s just crass.”

— Alexander McQueen

83. “I’ve had good times; I’ve had bad times.”

— Alexander McQueen

84. “Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.”

— Alexander McQueen

85. “I’m interested in designing for posterity.”

— Alexander McQueen

86. “I was never a big networker, but I was a spin doctor, all those shock shows, that’s how I got my first backers. But fashion’s a scary industry to be in, especially if you’ve not grown up with it.”

— Alexander McQueen

87. “Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive.”

— Alexander McQueen

88. “You find a lot of ideas from my shows in adverts now. I find it a compliment.”

— Alexander McQueen

89. “Some couture collections have everything including the kitchen sink! Everything gets thrown on to make it look expensive. I find it grotesque when clothes hit you in the face and there’s no room for fault. But I don’t expect to turn things around all by myself. I’m not a saint.”

— Alexander McQueen

90. “I think I should be a president. President of the United States.”

— Alexander McQueen

91. “I just want to be a wallflower. Nondescript. Just not anything. I don’t want to see me.”

— Alexander McQueen

92. “My relationships with producers or photographers – these are relationships that took years.”

— Alexander McQueen

93. “You can get insular with fashion.”

— Alexander McQueen

94. “I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I’ve always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it’s late.”

— Alexander McQueen

95. “The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.”

— Alexander McQueen

96. “The police need to come down to street level.”

— Alexander McQueen

97. “I like the idea of infiltrating an area that is not really exposed to me or my work.”

— Alexander McQueen

98. “I like the concept of dressing people. I used to not care whether people bought the clothes or not, but I kind of like it now. I wouldn’t label that commercialism; it’s more like I do this work because I want people to wear it.”

— Alexander McQueen

99. “Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual. When you see a woman in my clothes, you want to know more about them. To me, that is what distinguishes good designers from bad designers.”

— Alexander McQueen

100. “Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual.”

— Alexander McQueen