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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.