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Daily Inspiration Quote by Karl Lagerfeld

"Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary"

About this Quote

A Lagerfeld-ism in its purest form: clipped, slightly mangled, and weaponized into a philosophy. The broken syntax is doing cultural work. It mimics the impatience of a man who treated “taste” as a kind of moral hygiene and treated small talk as an enemy. He’s not trying to be lyrical; he’s trying to be final.

“Stupidly it should not be” is less about literal stupidity than about the cardinal sin in fashion: the lazy, the obvious, the unedited. Lagerfeld built an empire on the idea that elegance is intelligence made visible. Then he swivels: “It should be also nice.” Nice, here, isn’t softness; it’s usability. Wearable. Marketable. He’s admitting the quiet compromise at the heart of design: you can’t only impress the critics, you have to seduce the room.

“One must get along with that” is the shrug of someone who understands the system and refuses to romanticize it. Fashion is aspiration packaged as product, art forced into schedules, beauty forced into sizes. You live with the contradiction or you don’t last.

The kicker is the near-contradiction: “Is however not necessary.” In other words, “nice” is optional. Don’t make something pleasant just to be liked. That’s Lagerfeld’s long-running contempt for sentimentality, his preference for surface as truth rather than disguise. Contextually, it fits his late-20th-century reign: a designer who turned cold precision into charisma, and who understood that in a culture addicted to approval, refusal is a brand.

Quote Details

TopicWisdom
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Lagerfeld, Karl. (2026, January 18). Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/stupidly-it-should-not-be-it-should-be-also-nice-12159/

Chicago Style
Lagerfeld, Karl. "Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/stupidly-it-should-not-be-it-should-be-also-nice-12159/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/stupidly-it-should-not-be-it-should-be-also-nice-12159/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice - Lagerfeld
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About the Author

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Karl Lagerfeld (born September 10, 1938) is a Designer from Germany.

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