Art & Creativity Quote by Christian Lacroix

Paris, in Lacroix's memory, isn’t a city so much as a time machine with good lighting. The Andrews Sisters reference does two sly things at once: it reaches for a very specific kind of prewar glamour (tight harmonies, swing-era polish, morale-boosting shine), then admits the absurdity of wearing that shine as a costume in another decade. “Going out” becomes a form of dress-up not just in fabric, but in history.

The line about “books at my grandparents’ house” is the tell. This isn’t nostalgia for a lived past; it’s nostalgia for an inherited image-bank. Lacroix is describing how style gets smuggled across generations through domestic archives: coffee-table books, old photos, the curated mythologies of “before.” What he’s really capturing is the moment when youth culture realizes it can remix those myths and still feel contemporary. The thrill is not authenticity but recognition - the giddy click when you step into a scene that looks like an illustration you’ve been studying your whole life.

As a designer who built a career on exuberant historicism, Lacroix frames Paris nightlife as a runway for cultural quotation. The subtext is that modernity is rarely pure; it’s made from references, cravings, and borrowed silhouettes. “Only it was our generation” is the kicker: the past is less a retreat than raw material, made electric again by the fact that it’s being worn, loudly, by people who weren’t supposed to own it.