I want people to be afraid of the women I dress. Luxury will be always around, no matter what happens in the world.
Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them. My customers are successful workingwomen. I try to contrast; life today is full of contrast… We have to change. I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future. In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric – without a practical or visual reality. I’ve always tried to push myself technically and to push myself visually. That’s been part of the journey. Money doesn’t buy elegance. You can take an inexpensive sheath, add a pretty scarf, gray shoes, and a wonderful bag, and it will always be elegant. I don’t care about money. I really don’t care. I just want to do what I do. I think it’s an old fashioned notion that fashion needs to be exclusive to be fashionable.
Fashion can be this mysterious thing that you can’t explain. I design from instinct. It’s the only way I know how to live. What feels good. What feels right. What is needed. Give me a problem and I will approach it creatively, from my gut. My relationships with producers or photographers – these are relationships that took years. I am like a freight train. Working on the details, twisting them and playing with them over the years, but always staying on the same track. I like things simple.
I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body. I think I’d go mad if I didn’t have a place to escape to. I didn’t consider myself a fashion designer at all at the time of punk. I was just using fashion as a way to express my resistance and to be rebellious. I came from the country, and by the time I got to London, I considered myself to be very stupid. It was my ambition to understand the world I live in. The key to my collections is sensuality. Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.
