Top 50 Kenneth Cole Quotes

I never really had long range plans. I take one season at a time, every day at a time.

I think the power of messaging is saying something in as few words as possible, because I think we all essentially have ADD. It’s not a clinically diagnosed state anymore; it’s a socially imposed state.

Ads create dialogue, they create conversation, they create attention – that’s our objective.

Often people ask me about getting involved in service and philanthropy, and my first advice is: Make sure it’s real and it’s transparent.

I am the closest of all to my wife, who is in and of herself a change agent and has committed to impacting the realities of homelessness – and making sure I get out of the house every day to do what I have to do.

Through my ongoing work as a UNAIDS Ambassador and with the End AIDS Coalition, I remain personally committed to aligning resources and galvanizing global action and working with amfAR to make AIDS history.

When I first fell in love with Maria, it was because she really cares about things.

When I married Maria, her father was governor at the time, and I was in awe of his progressive message.

I came to realize that the law is about a book of rules, and he who learns them best, and is the most creative in interpreting them, goes furthest.

I’ve always believed that fashion is not just what you look like on the outside, it’s a reflection of who you are on the inside.

To the degree you could provoke people and engage them in a unique way, your message is more likely to resonate longer. I figured out the less-than-140-character concept long before Twitter came along.

When you go public, the value equation of your company changes immediately. It is valued on anticipated earnings.

When I started this business, I never anticipated this would become a platform for me to talk about things that I personally believe in.

I’m a pragmatist, and I don’t like gratuitous fashion – in fact, there’s not that much gratuitous anything in my life.

I’ve struggled with that over the years: Is fashion relevant? Is it frivolous? Is it trivial? Because I give so much of my essence to it, as do everybody I work with.

You can’t build a fashion business with a short-term perspective, unless you’re prepared to make investments that you know are not going to pay dividends immediately.

Rest is overrated.

There are only so many things we can do that make us feel better. We pick up the newspapers and we want to cry every day. We turn on the news and we want to jump out the first window, jump in front of the first truck.

After working with my father for two years, we started Candie’s, a line of imported shoes from Italy. Then in 1982 I set out to start my own business.

I always believe that if you’re looking at a magazine and I’m one of 40 ads, I – in effect – get one-fortieth of your attention. But if, when you close that magazine, you’re still thinking about my ad, I’ve got a lot more than one-fortieth of your attention.

Very early on in this journey, I uniquely found not just an aesthetic, but also a voice. I found the ability to communicate with people, which has turned out for me to be a far more meaningful platform. To talk to them about not just what’s on their body, but also on their minds.

I’m actually in the process of running from office. I’ve got so much access and ability to do so much great social outreach and public service as a private person.

When you sit around at dinner talking about the death penalty, it’s hard to find relevance in what color shoes will be next season.

If a brand is relevant anywhere, it’s essentially viable everywhere.

I love black. Anything black transforms lives in a profound way, particularly for women.

I believe much of our lives is about guilt management.

I wanted to make the brand cool again. I needed to make it a little smaller to make it bigger and I needed to change the consumer experience.

I don’t know what Galliano was thinking. Apparently he dressed people as homeless and sent them down the runway. That’s not very tasteful and somewhat exploitive.

What people are consuming is what things represent. It’s people defining themselves through what they wear.

In my opinion, being able to do some form of service is a gift. The one that provides the service is the greatest beneficiary – I will attest to it.

A brand today is much more than status. Consumers have to be able to trust it.

My job isn’t to tell people what they should wear. My job is to find out what they want and give it to them in a way they didn’t quite expect.

My job is to create a business model that’s built on a platform that has the ability to change quickly.

If every shoe store in America stops selling shoes, no one’s going to go barefoot for 15, 20 years. No one needs shoes, for the most part. We have shoes; our problem is what to do with them.

In business, you can write your own book. The more unique it is from anything written before, the more likely it is to succeed.

Being the son of a women’s shoe factory owner, ‘Kinky Boots’ resonated with me on so many different levels.

The more I circumvent the rules, the more successful I become.

In the early years I had no real plan. I figured it out as I went, which is easier to do when you don’t have a lot of staff and overhead. Back then I believed my job was just to create great-looking shoes. That wasn’t true. I learned that the shoes needed to fit, be comfortable, and not fall apart.

I work out with my trainer at 5 A. M. three times per week and I also skip dessert – most of the time.

We as a country are very good at responding to acute, short-term crises. When the crisis becomes chronic, we tend to withdraw.

There are many in the AIDS community who have said we won’t find a cure in the foreseeable future. Well, you certainly won’t find it if you’re not looking.

What’s so great about this industry is that you have to be able to reinvent yourself every day.

Everybody struggles to find a balance between their personal lives and their professional lives, and in some cases, their connection with the community. So what I’ve looked to do over the years is marry as many of those as I can.

I had left the runway because I had come to believe that it was questionably relevant and appropriate, because we were creating clothes that, to a large degree, never ended up making it to the stores. And the runway was being seen in markets where those clothes weren’t available.

When I was younger I would often go to nightclubs and sit in the best-lit corner to look at what people chose to wear, or I’d go out and around the city – to places where people express their sense of what they think looks good. So, I get a sense of that, and then I try to interpret it.

Not taking those few moments in the morning to decide what you’re saying to people by how you’re choosing to dress is a lost opportunity.

It’s hard to ignore the hand that feeds you, and today our communities are far more needy than they’ve ever been, and governments neither have the will nor the ability in many cases to provide the services that they need to.

Nobody cleans out their closet at the end of the season anymore.

Over the years, I have found a way to use this business and this platform to talk with people about important issues. To the degree you can bring a sense of purpose to what you do, it makes the relationship with the customer that much more meaningful and purposeful.

I love not being public.