I always loved fish for the colors and birds for the plumage. In the same way, I loved those women of the cabaret. They were birds of paradise.

Being on a trapeze is like dreaming. I feel totally outside of myself when I'm flying. You know, designing shoes, my imagination is flying in my drawings.

Designing my shoes, I'm thinking timeless. Not trendy.

Passage Vero-Dodat - I started my company on this passage. It feels as much home as it can!

I have no problem with the idea of comfort, but it is not an important thing aesthetically. If you look at a shoe and immediately say it looks very comfortable, in terms of design, it is not going to excite me. Of course, I am not putting nails in my shoes to ensure everybody is in pain, but a heel is not a pair of slippers and never will be.

My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, 'Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters - it breaks.' And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain - to be sensitive to the direction of life.

Listen, to appeal to someone else you might put on a pair of shoes that you don't like or a dress you don't like. But there's no way you're going to put on a perfume you don't like; it's too personal.