Cultural Recycling Quotes

The past is always recycled. I'm just taking what the people I looked up to did and translating it for my generation.

Everything comes back around. You never thought Louis Vuitton and Gucci and all that other stuff would come back. You know what I mean? And now it's one of the highest brands there is out. Everything just comes right back into circulation. Baggy jeans might come back out again. Might be a while, but they might.

Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics. At the end of the Roman era, there was this whole move against togas, because that was the signifier of the Roman Empire. In the same way, the '60s were a reaction against the '50s and so on. But now we've been feeding on a sort of cadaver. At the moment, we're just endlessly recycling the past.

I'm mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything's just compost that gets reused.

There's never a new fashion but it's old.

The whole point of American culture is to pick up any old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.