Best 80 quotes of Vera Wang on MyQuotes

A bride should look at everything she possibly can...just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.

All I did my first year at Vogue was Xerox.

All those years of skating and dancing have carried over. I can't design anything without thinking of how a woman's body will look and move when she's wearing it.

Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating. But I carried that with me for the rest of my life.

As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don't ever want to lose that.

A woman is never sexier than when she is comfortable in her clothes.

Bridal is always about who you are as a person and as a woman and as a lover and as a mate. People always ask me how a woman can pick just one dress. And the funny thing is they always know.

Brides today are increasingly sensitive to the tastes, feelings and finances of their attendants.

Certainly a big challenge for me with evening-wear is to make it look modern and artistic and avant-garde. The very concept of a ball gown is not in itself a modern concept, and women need to wear that for a certain presence in Hollywood. I'm also aware that a starlet might go to more than one place that night so the piece could also offer, maybe not a revolution, but an evolution.

Design is about point of view, and there should be some sort of woman or lifestyle or attitude in one's head as a designer.

Don't be afraid to take time to learn. It's good to work for other people. I worked for others for 20 years. They paid me to learn.

Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry. No one plays more of a significant role than the bride's attendants.

Every woman hates her own body. I don't know a woman who doesn't . . . well, I do know a few who love themselves but in the case of most women it's like, "ugh." And when I dress a woman, my design intention is to give them an attitude or a grace, no matter whether it's a wedding gown or ready-to-wear.

Fashion offers no greater challenge than finding what works for night without looking like you are wearing a costume.

Fashion to me has become very disposable; I wanted to get back to craft, to clothes that could last.

Figure skating has been a great influence for me. I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror.

I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.

I brought color to bridal. There was one whole season of blush. If you think about the bareness, the illusion (fabric), the corsets that I did in bridal, they were trends in ready-to-wear, too.

I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

I do think I know more about clothes than any 500 designers, because there's nothing like wearing them. You buy them, you study them, and you start to understand how they're crafted.

I hate phones. All businesses are personal businesses, and I always try my best to get back to people, but sometimes the barrage of calls is so enormous that if I just answered calls I would do nothing else.

I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the pictures.

I love a black wedding dress.

I love sportswear in my own weird way. Fashion is such a personal journey for me. I'm much more of a girl that's a T-shirt, legging, layering kind of thing, and outerwear.

I love the focus and bravery of European designers, but I love the nonchalance and throwaway aspect of America that has made Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein two of the greatest icons. I try to bridge those two worlds in my work. The clothes may be couture on the runway but there's an attitude that's very street and that comes from America.

I make things of my own that aren't that glam, but I'm not known for that, which has always been a bit of a frustration for me.

I'm not really a girl who likes to go out to lunch or cocktails or store openings.

I'm only waiting for Lindsay Lohan's fashion collection to come out. Ten years from now, there may be no real designers left.

I never thought I'd be successful. It seems in my own mind that in everything I've undertaken I've never quite made the mark. But I've always been able to put disappointments aside. Success isn't about the end result; it's about what you learn along the way.

In terms of bridal dress, I've tried everything. I've tried short, long, deconstructed, constructed, bustiers, working in fabrics, working in color. I've been working in color in bridal for probably 15 years. Who else would do an entire collection dipped in tea? I did that one year. My design team dipped every single dress in tea in a bathtub. I did that just because I wanted to work out of the vocabulary of white.

In the dream world of Matisse and the gritty reality of American frontier, the diversity of women in our society offers the chance for greater exploration and even greater inspiration.

I see myself as an arbiter of taste.

I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.

Is she going to, or has she done it? Has it happened? What is the story here?

I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women. Design is about point of view, and there should be some sort of woman or lifestyle or attitude in one's head as a designer. So my being able to reach the masses was something that meant a great deal to me - especially for women who could never wear Vera Wang.

I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women.

I think fashion is intensely personal. It should be. It should give a woman a creative outlet, it should give her a little bit of an escape, and it should give her a little bit of individuality that she can add to her life. I don't mean redoing your entire closet. I mean that a great shoe or a great handbag or a great top or a great coat or jacket can change everything.

I think there's going to be a real push in the next two years in Asia - China and Korea specifically. And that's a huge undertaking. Ten years ago it was impossible to break into that part of the world. Some of the biggest companies in the world found it challenging. But I am Chinese-American and I think what we do will resonate in China. So that's where we see our biggest opportunities going forward. I do speak Mandarin and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

It's a remarkable exercise to sit and look at your own work over the years.

It's for all the women who embrace my aesthetic, but can't afford a Vera Wang dress. If women can get anything out of it - a little bit of me or a lot of me, that's what's important.

It's hard to juggle being a businessperson with being a creative person. You have to organize yourself - PR needs me for PR, and the licensing division needs me for licensing, the bridal people need me for bridal.

It's important to view fashion as personal and creative - even for brides. When brides ask me, "What's the best advice you can give me on my wedding day?" I always have the same answer: "Be yourself." Someone's marrying you, they love you for who you are, and they don't want you to be someone else, they want you to be who you are. If you never wear blue eye shadow, why would you put it on on your wedding day? If you wear your hair simply, why would you suddenly dye it a different color and get a big 'do? To me it's about respect and self-understanding and honesty.

It takes tremendous will to compete in any athletic endeavor, so it meant going to bed early and getting my homework done in advance. I had to sacrifice things, like a social life, to be a skater at 15. But I loved skating so much that it was worth everything to me.

I used to get tons of letters that said, "I'll never get to wear you," or "I'll never get married in one of your dresses," or "I'll never have an evening gown like the one I saw on the red carpet." I thought that was sad, because you give your life to this and you end up reaching very few people. So that was a major goal for me - to be able to reach and encourage more women, to encourage them to express themselves and be what they want to be.

I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear.

I wanted to breathe new life into the timeless trend of past, present and future. These unique designs celebrate the bride and groom's passage through their new life together.

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.

I want people to see the dress, but focus on the woman.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

I was a total fashion insider who became an outsider when I did bridal.