Polly Allen Mellen Quotes

I will never get tired of looking at works by Pablo Picasso. I will never get tired of looking at work by Francis Bacon or Henry Moore or Francisco Goya. You cannot tire of the work these people have made because you can look it over and over again – the same thing – and always see something different.

I think Diana Vreeland recognized the passion and the energy I had. I stayed at Harper’s Bazaar for two years, until I met my first husband and moved on to Philadelphia in 1952. But they were incredible years – wonderful, wonderful years. But, anyway, my career sort of took off from there. I was really blessed.

They were enormously chic. My father was very chic. My mother was a heavy woman and she wore wonderful, bright colors, and pajamas, but when she was in town or in New York City or in Paris, she would wear navy blue or black. But there was a flamboyance to both of them.

You can squint and see something else, or something will come forward in the paint. You’ll always see something else.

I remember once I didn’t like a dress that we had to shoot – I’ll never forget this – and so I turned it inside out and put it on the model backward.

It’s great advice – to open your eyes, have a little humility, and let go of ego. I think that instills in you a sense of responsibility. I also think you have to feel like you want to enrich your life, and you want to keep your eyes open, and you want to listen and be a good listener.

Style doesn’t have seasons.

I loved the masculine style of dressing of Katharine Hepburn, who came from the same town that I came from. I was fascinated by the way she wore trousers. So I think the romanticism of the movies also influenced my life and my interest in fashion greatly.

I love street, adore street. Life is about mixing things and to be divine in the streets. Voila!

You cannot squelch what’s happening at the moment – you cannot put a lid on it and squash it down.

Helmut Lang is an amazing man – always striving, always moving forward.

I wear all my T-shirts from Helmut Lang with the holes in the elbows, which people always speak of. When my husband gets a hole in his sweater, at his elbow, he says, “It’s very Helmut Lang!”

I like people with guts. I want to feel in the clothes what the designer is really feeling when they’re alone with themselves and their fabrics and they’re drawings, and what happens when they let the creativity that they have been blessed with come forward. That’s why they are who they are.

That’s why you have to keep your mind open – so that you can be given the privilege to have five weeks in Japan and take all of that in. I mean, that’s privilege to be able to do that. And you have to give that privilege back – it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the madding crowd.

I think movies also played a part in my interest in fashion. I’ve also always been hooked on the movies. From my early teens on, I always had my favorite movie stars who I admired, like Carole Lombard and Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, and the men in my life who I loved, like Gary Cooper.