I am still in love with couture because it is just two months from drawing pad to runway so everything on the catwalk is hot from the oven.

Much later, designers like Dior and Saint Laurent recreated styles form the ’30s and ’40s.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

For me, elegance is not to pass unnoticed but to get to the very soul of what one is.

I never loved the world around me as it was.

That was the idea behind glam clubs like Seven and The New Eve. You could eat and dance to live music. To enter you had to descend a grand staircase.

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.

The Paris store Colette is successful because it’s a filter for things that are made elsewhere. It’s the kind of store France needs.

There’s always some kind of hidden logic.

My first time in England, in the ’60s, the interiors were somehow familiar to me, probably because of the books I’d read and the images I’d seen.

If I was a fashion designer just following trends or designing for celebrities, I would not be fulfilled.

The world needs some excitement from fashion.

Ready-to-wear — that means ‘ready to wear’. Some people are doing couture during ready-to-wear (fashion week), others are putting up performances, we just come here with our little flowers.

We all look for lost time.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been influenced by the idea that my name could be spread across the entire world.

They say that the best furniture and clothing design from the ’50s and ’60s is Scandinavian or Milanese.

My fear was that people expected radical change because of the new contract. But no.

Going out in Paris was like going out in the ’30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I’d seen in books at my grandparents’ house, only it was our generation.

The idea of seeing everybody clad the same is not really my cup of tea.

People want to be in their own fashion tribes, so they want to wear the same clothes to be connected to everyone else in that tribe. But they want to be different from other tribes.

I’ve known for a long time, but I have only really taken it in this morning – and I think I will be shedding a tear by tonight,

If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes – the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War – they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms...

In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.

Very skinny women don’t look beautiful in clothes.

Pucci is a continuing story, she said.

But the Milanese have made bad choices, bad fashion, and bad jewelry.

The exchange by e-mail is more intimate than conversation – you allow yourself to say things you otherwise wouldn’t.

I look for friends who make me laugh.

Ready-to-wear — that means ‘ready to wear’,

Fashion needs to be worn.

I translated Beatles songs for my English class.

There are days when I’m completely depressed and able to do only one drawing.

I wanted to go back to the beginning and to the codes of the house.

Italy is a divided country without a center.

I’d experienced the ’40s and ’50s by looking at my grandparents’ old clothes, books, and magazines.

I am always anxious to know what has happened while I’ve been asleep.

But it seemed like the more we advanced, the more the future looked impossible, making us return to the more radical times in the past.

Since I was a child I’ve loved going to the opera, theatre and ballet.

I think it’s always difficult to reconcile the needs of art and business.

I am not nostalgic for the past.

For fifteen years I’ve had Swiss clients who tell me that it’s a mystery how the French react to their own artists, especially the painters.

For me, I am still very happy to be able to do stage design as it’s an opportunity to express the extreme.

You need ego but mine is not blinding.