Top 25 Peter Marino Quotes

I have this ‘Alice in Wonderland‘ idea in my head that a garden should be a place of wonderment.

Design-wise, I look at everything. If I don’t personally design it, I’ll review it. I’m kind of creative director of the firm.

I don’t sell anything. So, I have a personal image, but I think that’s because I’m from an art background, and I’m an artist, and I think most artists do have personal images. I consider myself more in that category of the way an artist had a look.

I do really modern with materials that are so luxurious that they’re, like, baroque.

If I need a pair of tennis shorts, I’ll buy them online. I don’t really care. Not going to go and try on a pair and see how my bum looks. Who cares? But for things that you care about – I mean, a jacket and a pair of trousers, you’ve got to try them on.

Motorcycle garb is the way I looked to Warhol. Then came the Armani suits.

One of my first fashion clients was Calvin Klein. We did his first freestanding stores. He was very exact and precise. But talk about high-fashion people who brand themselves!

That was really the Fifties for me – that whole spirit of flicking the paint on the canvas.

We have a thousand hydrangea plants bordering the house, and they were all supposed to be pink, but a handful of them keep turning purple.

If you want to come up with a really original design idea, and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That’s all.

Anytime I see an unusual combination of colors or patterns or texture, I buy it.

Ginza! Where I’ve done two Chanel towers and Louis Vuitton and Dior stores. I just feel at home there.

I believe that women would crawl across broken glass to get a cool pair of shoes.

I like more the fact that I like to think out of the box. Thinking out of the box goes along with dressing out of the box and living out of the box.

Publicity doesn’t really get me anything. Clients are not going to hire me for a $100 million building because I have a brand. They really want the product.

The Peninsula – it’s a combination of great service and good design.

I want to be the first person to animate bags – everything done for handbags bores me to tears – I want to make it more playful.

I’m really a fighter against modernism equaling brutalism.

I collect art like other people eat pizza. I can’t get enough of it. I need a constant source of inspiration.

The French use gardens to show grandeur and the English to show how things have endured for hundreds of years, but for me, they’re all about fantasy.

My name is on the door, and I care very much about the design that gets put out. I’m sorry, but it has to be my way. You learn that by working for people like I. M. Pei. You think he isn’t a design tyrant? Is Calvin Klein a tyrant? When it came to his dresses, he had to be.

My father‘s house was on East 55th Street on 1st and 2nd Avenues. I’m fifth-generation Marino in the East 50s – I live on 57th Street. I can’t be more East 50s.

When I opened Chanel in London, they were happy. People would go, ‘Oh, I just came in to see it. It’s so beautiful.’ And you leave with a positive attitude toward the brand. Now, you don’t really get that online. You don’t go, like, ‘Wow.’

I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week – and I love it. I’m creative. I feel fulfilled. I’m from a solidly lower-middle-class background; I’m not from the world that I’m in now. So I appreciate it a lot. I’ve really got a rich, full life.

Not enough people enjoy working with color, which delights and inspires me.