Three rules of success in fashion: perseverance, dream a bit and be passionate about it.

If you're going to do a memoir, then it's sort of at this age - in your late sixties or seventies - that you do it. I don't understand people who do memoirs when they're 20. I think most people need a little more time than 20 years to become the person they are. In fact, that process of becoming who you are is still ongoing when you get older, where you go, "Let's see where my next 10 years is going to take me." S

I think I got left behind somewhere, because, you know, I'm still a romantic

Fashion isn't just frocks. It's how we do our houses, our gardens, it's what we eat and drink.

Sometimes I think I’m the last remaining person who goes to the shows for the pleasure of seeing the clothes, rather than desperately wanting to be there for the social side

People stopping you in the street, though, is very different from being hounded by the press, which is the kind of attention that celebrities get, and I'm probably too old for that kind of thing to happen anyway. I think it happens more when you're dating all sorts of different very handsome actors or something. They want gossip and scandal, and they know they're not going to get it from me because I'm too old to be scandalous. Of course, they could read the book - although it's not really a scandalous book.

For me, one of the most important aspects of my work is to give people something to dream about, just as I used to dream all those years ago as a child looking at beautiful photographs. I still weave dreams, finding inspiration wherever I can and looking for romance in the real, not the digital, world