Quote of Note | Valentino’s Maria Grazia Chiuri
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Looks from the fall 2011 Valentino ready-to-wear collection.
“With this [most recent] collection, the idea from the very beginning was not to do ‘editorial’ things just for the sake of it. Not clothes that were a photo, but clothes. However, at the same time, we wanted classic fashion—meaning, when a customer enters the store, she finds a coat or a dress that is made so well that it takes her back to what we consider fashion in the most traditional sense of the word. Because in recent years, the image of fashion has prevailed over traditional fashion, meaning sartorial detailing and workmanship. But fashion designing means creating something using a special technique that might not emerge in a photo, but when you look at it up close, you see that it’s stylish. That’s a cultural problem. Clearly we live in a time where image is more important than content.”
–Maria Grazia Chiuri, co-creative director of Valentino, in an interview with Giancarlo Giammetti published in the May issue of Interview magazine
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“For me, museums don’t necessarily have to be museums. One of my favorite cultural institutions is the Cinémathèque in Tangier. Another is the National Institute of Design in Ahmadabad, India. Incredible! A museum, a school, a library, a marketplace, and an archive. To plan a new museum, we need to look at them and at science labs, factories, and archives. We need to be daring and courageous and to take risks—really interesting risks.” –Chris Dercon, 
“Perfume is not the bottle; it’s the perfumer. We’re going to be purist about that. It’s about the olfactory artist, not the company. It’s not Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey—which is an ingenious perfume, by the way—it’s Jacques Cavallier’s. It’s not Robert Piguet’s Fracas, it’s Germaine Cellier’s. Her construction of Fracas was the first great Brutalist work of art.”
“I’m ready to design a mosque. I think that would be something important to do. I think, in design, we want to do things which have meaning, which are important. The meaning can be in making design, but also in the subject where you put your attention. The world’s been getting smaller. People are more and more close to each other. I think it’s more important we show respect for each other and show ways to do it. I think it would be respectful. We can live together and be respectful, and not share ideas. I would love to do that. I think I will.”
“The media have as much opportunity today as they have ever had. The creation of content has never been more important. It’s wide open for all sorts of new creative ventures. The dissemination of content to every nook and cranny of the world has never been easier. It has gone from paintings on cavemen’s walls to the ability to digitally beam movies, television, news, information, and music into every cave in the world. The need for entertaining, informative, provocative, and important ideas has never been close to what it is today. I don’t think it’s all about user generation of material or democracy in media. It’s still about human beings coming together and deciding what is and isn’t interesting.” —New-media entrepreneur 
“When you go to designers’ houses, you see a lot of kitsch. Instead of living the work they do, they like to see the exaggerated edges of how things can go. And kitsch has a kind of shameless enthusiasm that allows you to revel in these values, like excessive decoration or the overly bold use of color, that are not quite respectable. It’s the same sort of appeal as postmodernism, except kitsch is done with such self-consciousness. It’s fun for its own sake. You can’t say it’s elegant or beautiful, but you can say it’s a lot of fun.”
“‘Redesign’ has become a dirty word in magazine publishing. Our 
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