These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn’t be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.

You can only go forward by making mistakes. I'm twenty-seven, not fifty-seven. I'm not Givenchy, I'm Alexander McQueen.

Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.

I was never a big networker, but I was a spin doctor, all those shock shows, that's how I got my first backers. But fashion's a scary industry to be in, especially if you've not grown up with it.

When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there’s a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off.

It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.

My friend George and I were walking on the beach in Norfolk, and there were thousands of [razor-clam] shells. They were so beautiful, I thought I had to do something with them. So, we decided to make [a dress] out of them. . . . The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O’Conner] came out and trashed the dress, so their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really.