Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I’m attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually. I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves – that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness. There is always an emotional element to anything that you make. I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle. It’s hard to balance everything. It’s always challenging. My relationships with producers or photographers – these are relationships that took years. I can’t get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it’s just crass. My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor. Vanity is the healthiest thing in life. I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves – that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness. You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don’t need to do that any more. I don’t really know how to do casual clothes.
Breaking Up With Fast Fashion Has Been Easier
I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great. Success isn’t about the end result, it’s about what you learn along the way. I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.
I don’t really know how to do casual clothes. Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I’m attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually. Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. I think I’d go mad if I didn’t have a place to escape to. I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body.
Left Align Image
The difference between style and fashion is quality. Dressing is a way of life. Delete the negative; accentuate the positive! That is the key of this collection, being yourself. Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live. Clothes can transform your mood and confidence. Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they’re doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real. I am convinced that you don’t need to spend a fortune to look like a million. I am especially grateful that I have been able to keep my own style over the decades, in spite of the many changes that have taken place in the world of fashion and in its business. I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty. Being one step ahead of a fashion trend is not so important to me. What matters is to always forge ahead.
Awkwardness gives me great comfort. I’ve never been cool, but I’ve felt cool. I’ve been in the cool place, but I wasn’t really cool – I was trying to pass for hip or cool. It’s the awkwardness that’s nice. We look our best in subdued colors, sophisticated cuts, and a general air of sleek understatement. I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body.
“I try as much as possible to give you a great basic product and what comes out, I feel, is really amazing.”
If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something. We live in an era of globalization and the era of the woman. Never in the history of the world have women been more in control of their destiny.
