I love and respect women. I work mostly with women.

I've always said fashion is like roast chicken: You don't have to think about it to know it's delicious.

Fashion is not always about what's new, it's also about what's good. And I think if you need to see what's good, you have to be there.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

What I love in fashion is to tell a story through a creation.

In fashion, we have a reputation for being such a façade, fake people, but none of the fashion people who I know are fake.

Yves Saint Laurent gave women power, Chanel liberated them and when I joined Lanvin, I thought 'what do I bring to women? One day, I received an SMS from a friend in New York - she was in a taxi on the way to court to face her arsehole ex-husband, and she said to me 'Alber, I am wearing a Lanvin dress, and I feel so protected.' That to me was the biggest compliment I ever received. To have a 500 gram piece of silk make her feel protected - that made me very happy indeed.