Riccardo Tisci Quotes

My relationship with religion is very strong because it was my hope, and it gave me two things very important in my life. It gave me the belief and it gave me a point to reach: Don't do something bad to the people next to you.

My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life.

Couture was only for rich people. Givenchy was for rich people. A bag cost 5,000 euro; a coat cost 10,000 euro. In the beginning, I couldn't react. I was just working like a machine, because I wanted to make the house happy.

We didn't have a television, so we sat around the table, and me and my sisters and my mom would do these jobs, like, a penny for a piece, you know, these paper jobs. You know, what really saved me as a human today is my sisters and my mom.

My mom didn't teach me about Marco Polo. She didn't teach me about Napoleon. She didn't teach me about any of that. But she did teach me how to survive and to be a good person. And you need to be a strong woman to do that. She's the biggest person in my life. She's my Virgin Maria. That's why I love religion so much.

When I started at 9, I was working with plaster. I worked with a florist. It was a little illegal for kids to work. They would give you tips because they couldn't really give you wages.

There was a loneliness because kids my age had video games, tennis. They traveled. They had beautiful clothes. I was wearing my sisters' old clothes that were adjusted on me, because we didn't have money to buy clothes. So that really made me go deep inside on my heart, because the only things I could have with me were my heart and my brain.

Anything I do, I do with my heart. This is why I sometimes get very upset or sometimes get very personal when I'm working.

My life has changed financially and I have a name, but I try to never forget people on my journey.

I can give a beautiful present, and that may change the lives of people around me.

Every two to three weeks, I was changing around my room. My room was made out of nothing, basically - a magazine, a little radio, a little bed - and I had the sensibility to put things together and match things in a certain way so that they were very special.

I try to destroy taboo in fashion-which is something I learned as a kid. I come from the street, and you have to be a survivor,

I'm very faithful to myself. When you do things that are true it just comes out quite instinctively.

I was a very nice boy. I was well-educated ... very Catholic family. So I was very respectful, never late at work. I was always the last one to leave. It's always been that way in my life.

In the beginning, I was very punk. I was very revolutionary. When they asked me to do Givenchy, I didn't want to do it. My friends pushed me. But the situation with my family was so bad financially. I really did it because, when they told me how much they would pay me, I saw that my sisters and my mom could have a better life.

I love art and music more than I love fashion, to be honest,

I suffered a lot when there was, like, a birthday party and I was not invited. Not because I was ugly or stupid; I was not invited because the parents would say to the kids, "Don't invite him, because he's poor and he comes from the south of Italy, and he can't give you nothing."

At the beginning, I didn't see what Givenchy could give my career. It was like, "Okay, I'll do it for the money for a few years to help my mom and my sisters."

The aborigines in Australia, the way they dress is very honest; it's not about: "Oh, you wear a skirt, you're gay."

My friends were like, "Oh, this weekend, we're going to go shopping." "Oh, this weekend I'm going to go to see the judo champion" ... you know. And I couldn't do anything.

I've had this sensibility since I was a child. If there was a black boy in the school, I was the friend. If there was an effeminate guy, I was the friend. If there was somebody who was poor like me, I was the friend.

I am interested in beauty when it has something special and mysterious.

I think my heart is in a very good place. And I think this is why I'm achieving what I've been asking to do in the universe for so long.

I'm very well off but I can stay with normal people. I can do a super-luxury life, but I can do a very normal life and I'm not scared.

I've got what I want, and I've got the luck to express myself and to be paid and to do what I do as a creative person.

No matter how much people in fashion think we're so cool and avant-garde, for most fashion people, creativity is quite taboo.

I was the last one of nine kids - eight girls and me last - and my sisters were going out. They were teenagers. And as they were getting ready, I would sit on the bathtub and watch them put on makeup and transform themselves - you know, putting on clothes and giggling about the boys they were going to meet and everything. So for me, that was an amazing thing - the fact of transforming themselves.

My obsession when I was kid, from '85 into the '90s, was Gianni Versace. It was Helmut Lang. It was Margiela. So I said, "I cannot have Givenchy only as a luxury house; I'm going to introduce products for everybody, things that are reachable."

Religion and love don't have a price, don't have a gender, a skin color, nothing. We are all on the same plate.

When I was far away, when I prayed every night, I felt I was very near with my heart, with my brain, to my sisters and my mom.

Even though I had a fantastic family, I always felt lonely - not lonely in the melancholic way but knowing that, to really survive, I have to do everything for myself. I had to work and study, and I was out in the street really surviving, bringing food back home.

I brought a lot of the codification of womenswear to menswear. Why? Because when I was a child, I was wearing women's clothes adjusted to me.

One thing my mom didn't want any of us to do was to cry or to complain about life. Every day and night, even when we didn't have much food, we would pray together. And that for me was a beautiful moment. The fact of being poor didn't really hurt me.

I didn't invent hot water. But when I approach menswear, I do it in a very honest way. And my menswear and womenswear are very similar, in the sense that I put men in leggings and lace shirts.

In the beginning I didn't want to do a menswear collection. It felt a little forced. And then I found that it was an amazing world.