Top 44 Marcel Wanders Quotes

I love Milano. Historically, the city is the biggest intellectual design thinking container. It is the cradle of design as well as the hometown of the mothers of its important heroes.

What’s special about Amsterdam is that the city is able to connect worlds that are not otherwise connected.

The ‘Dezeen’s of this world are extremely inspirational but have no realistic dimension any more.

For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It’s very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.

To me, relaxing doesn’t mean that we play ding-dong songs and look at a wall of bamboo. It’s just completely unoriginal.

Opulence doesn’t cost more than boring.

Function is fundamental to design, of course. If something doesn’t work, it’s a bad product, and I certainly get frustrated by things that aren’t functional. But there has to be more than function. A house has to function, but if that’s all it does, you don’t love it.

I like swimming. I like the beach. I like fast cars. I like speedboats.

The one thing we should address is how design can play a role in the psychological durability of objects, to think of how objects can be engineered in a way that they will be good over time.

By training, I’m an engineer, but I don’t tell anyone because it bores people.

Every project has its own logic and parameters. In some objects, functionality is primary, and in others, it is rather inconsequential.

I want to create a body of work that is really, deeply important to people. One of the vehicles I use is business.

Beauty is very important, but it’s not the most important thing in the world.

I listen to a variety of music. I like everything from old Arabic music to Portuguese fados.

M.A.C. stands for makeup, art, and cosmetics. We’re about bringing all these worlds together – makeup, design, fashion.

Being open to the unexpected allows me to bring so much to my craft.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

To transfer food into a bowl from a pan that you’ve just cooked in, it’s a loss of energy; it’s wasteful. People think it’s very sophisticated, I don’t think it’s so smart.

San Francisco is a lot like Amsterdam – free, open-minded and casual – though I expected better weather.

Food can be a material, and you can use it as a way to project concepts.

A lot of companies are able to do without design. A few companies are able to do without creativity. A very few. Creativity is crucial to your business.

My design always has a political agenda. When I borrow components from various cultures and juxtapose them in an object, it is a message that co-existence is indeed possible. Design creates an ideal world where different ideas live close to each other in perfect harmony.

If you acquire things, you have to let them go.

I’m not the type of person who feels bad about things before. I choose what to do at the moment, and I have a very good reason for it; otherwise, I don’t do it. If later my feelings change, I should celebrate now by being more wise, not feel bad about before.

I really feel that design has the capacity to communicate, and I really have concentrated on the communication of positive values.

Often, I’m sitting opposite a client, and I’m thinking, ‘How do I convince him to not copy the best-selling product out there?’ And sometimes I don’t know. Really, it’s smarter to be a thief.

There is always a reason behind things that are made, and if there isn’t, there will be one when they travel through the world. The objects of beauty are used to impress, seduce, overwhelm, make money, support identities, and show power or style, among other things.

I think design is the expression of its time and culture.

I wear mascara sometimes, a little lip gloss.

I have been a designer all my life, and design, for me, is to share love and trust and show the future in a beautiful way. I have worked on this principle all my life.

Everything has been thought of before… the real problem is to think of it again.

The need to express yourself in Los Angeles makes the city so vibrant. If I lived here, it would be lovely to be in a cool new high-rise looking out over a city that is exploding.

Nothing grows old faster than the new.

I’ve turned into something of a health nut.

I like my products to be smart in a technical way but to show the time invested in their creation, too.

We are buying stuff we know we don’t need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.

The very best design, I feel, is that which resonates so deeply that people can’t help but discover something within themselves when they see it.

In tech, people want an object for what’s inside it, what it does. You need to make a defensive design that people won’t walk away from. A chair is aggressive – you want a customer to choose it from many others.

Design, by definition, is an eco-friendly activity, as its aim is to create objects which are meaningful and durable. Trends always cost resources, but a true designer creates wares which will remain relevant forever.

People like their handbag more than their sofa, and I hate it.

Everything has been done. It’s not possible to create something completely new, something that has never been seen before. It’s only possible to make new combinations, establish new connections between things we usually take for granted.

I collect memories. I look for opportunities to try new things, go to new places, and meet new people all the time.

A good gift celebrates the relationship between the giver and the receiver. When you open that box, you feel like, ‘Wow, you really understood me.’ At the same time, you think this gift could come only from that person.

As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.