Top 50 Yves Saint Laurent Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fashions fade, style is eternal.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

2. “Dressing is a way of life.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

Featured in: Fashion Quotes

3. “Without elegance of the heart, there is no elegance.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

4. “The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who haven’t had the fortune of finding this happiness, I am there.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

5. “The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

6. “I was born with a nervous breakdown.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

7. “Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

8. “I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

9. “When you feel good in a clothing anything can happen. A good clothing is a passport for happiness.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

10. “To be beautiful, woman enough to have a black sweater, black skirt and walk arm in arm with the man she loves.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

11. “Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”

— Yves Saint Laurent

12. “Finding your own style is not easy, but once found it brings complete happiness. It gives you self-confidence, always.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

13. “My name will be written in fiery letters on the Champs Elysees.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

14. “Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

Featured in: Fun Quotes

15. “I have always believed that fashion was not only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

16. “Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”

— Yves Saint Laurent

17. “Fashion is defined by what later becomes out of fashion.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

18. “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

19. “For me, perfume, must be adapted to fashion, not the other way around.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

20. “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity – all I hope for in my clothes.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

21. “For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion. Fashions come and go, but style is forever.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

22. “No more rules, the freedom of dressing. The beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

23. “I don’t really like knees.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

24. “A good model can advance fashion by ten years.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

25. “Elegance and beauty have been banished.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

26. “Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!”

— Yves Saint Laurent

27. “Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don’t burn your wings.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

28. “Anyone who reaches for great expression has to be careful of the ridiculous.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

29. “I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

30. “Chanel freed women, and I empowered them.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

31. “I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me – a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

32. “Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation, If, in ready-to-wear, a garment is manufactured according to standard sizes, the haute couture garment adapts to any imperfection in order to eliminate it.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

33. “We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

34. “I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it’s worth I did it.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

35. “What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

36. “I am no longer concerned with sensation and innovation, but with the perfection of my style.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

37. “The street and me is a love story. 1971 is a great date because, finally, fashion took to the street.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

38. “I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

39. “Decadence attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society’s struggle between life and death is absolutely beautiful.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

40. “Fashion is like a party. Getting dressed is preparing to play a role.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

41. “It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic by fashion.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

42. “I’m so secluded. Very alone.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

43. “I cannot pretend to do sculpture and make a woman the ridiculous pedestal of my pretensions. To render clothing poetic, yes – but one must preserve its dignity as clothing.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

44. “I don’t at all search for an ideal woman, but several ideal women.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

45. “I want to thank all the women who have worn my clothes, the famous and the unknown, who have been so faithful to me and given me so much joy.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

46. “I’d really like to be in closer contact with life. I’m a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

47. “I couldn’t love a woman who inspired me to be totally disinterested. If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

48. “I love women. I love all the bright and attractive people and things of this world, the flame and also the moth, the dancer and the dance.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

49. “I adore America. It’s an extraordinary country. A new country.”

— Yves Saint Laurent

Featured in: Country Quotes

50. “Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.”

— Yves Saint Laurent