Top 30 Hedi Slimane Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Music has shaped men’s fashion and transposed in a playful and witty manner its riding or military heritage. It is difficult to figure out who leads but music and fashion are connected genetically.”

— Hedi Slimane

2. “I’d like men to think about evolving into something more sophisticated, more seductive. To explore the possibility of an entirely new masculinity.”

— Hedi Slimane

3. “I shared this idea that fashion starts with a movement, an allure: elusive, defined through perfect proportions.”

— Hedi Slimane

4. “I’m most interested in that moment when my entire perspective changes, and I have to reconsider everything.”

— Hedi Slimane

5. “Fashion somehow, for me, is purely and happily irrational.”

— Hedi Slimane

6. “In the future, fast-fashion retailers might change their philosophy toward real efforts to create a world of their own. One can only hope.”

— Hedi Slimane

7. “I’ve always done the style that I loved, so I didn’t mind sending an old pair of jeans down the runway. It’s about that style. It’s not Hedi Slimane. You know, I’m not all that familiar with his thing-I really don’t look. I certainly know who he is.”

— Hedi Slimane

8. “Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.”

— Hedi Slimane

9. “I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.”

— Hedi Slimane

10. “I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.”

— Hedi Slimane

11. “I discovered Los Angeles in the late 90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.”

— Hedi Slimane

12. “David Bowie, for me, was the butchest guy in town. Jagger was like a truck driver.”

— Hedi Slimane

13. “An athletic man, or whatever you want to call him, will only look good in a very classic suit, a pair of classic jeans, athletic clothes or simply naked. Forget fashion. This is not going to happen, unless you want to look like a Chippendales dancer in designer clothes.”

— Hedi Slimane

14. “I’m going to design again, but I come back when it’s the right project, so I keep my passion for it intact.”

— Hedi Slimane

15. “I started as a black-and-white teenage photographer, and I’m still there decades after. In some ways, the genre is almost gone. I am thinking of true, stubborn, lifetime black-and-white photographers, as opposed to black-and-white as a photographic commodity.”

— Hedi Slimane

16. “Music defines decades, and quite clearly shapes the rhythm, vitality of fashion, attitude and social behaviors. The anthology, just like most of my work, from photography to fashion design, is about and around music.”

— Hedi Slimane

17. “Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street – someone that has no idea. “Heroism” in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.”

— Hedi Slimane

18. “Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.”

— Hedi Slimane

19. “The framework of men’s wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.”

— Hedi Slimane

20. “I love California. It has such a strong contribution to the history of culture, and popular culture. For better and worse, of course. Even the worst can be interesting to some degree sometimes for somebody creative.”

— Hedi Slimane

21. “When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn’t get in trouble in his neighborhood.”

— Hedi Slimane

22. “Men are not supposed to be mysterious. That’s what you say about women. But I think men can have a little of it, too.”

— Hedi Slimane

23. “I always loved designing, but the context needs to be right, and have a positive perspective.”

— Hedi Slimane

24. “The iPad needs to catch up with Flash before I put a hand on it.”

— Hedi Slimane

25. “I like it to stay very organic, and to remember a personal story behind all my subjects.”

— Hedi Slimane

26. “I like the idea of paradox, between the authentic fabrics and sophisticated shapes and between masculine and feminine. I’m not so much for sportswear. I think it’s over.”

— Hedi Slimane

27. “I presume my work has also always been about reduction without any distraction or after effects, outside emotions, or intimacy or complicity with the subject...”

— Hedi Slimane

28. “Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It’s often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.”

— Hedi Slimane

29. “Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives.”

— Hedi Slimane

30. “Men’s fashion has a certain heaviness in the fabrics and construction. But also there is a heaviness in the mentality.”

— Hedi Slimane

31. “Hedi was and is still misspelled ‘Heidi,’ and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age.”

— Hedi Slimane

32. “I have a great admiration and tenderness for Azzedine Alaia. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I guess he must be still sewing some dresses at night.”

— Hedi Slimane

33. “I thought I should work more on the idea that you wear a suit or a jacket because of the fun it can provide, because it’s a game, because it might even have a sexual quality.”

— Hedi Slimane

34. “The perfect integrity of The NewYork Times, and its writers, is not precisely ‘just silly nonsense,’”

— Hedi Slimane