Life is never what it seems - and that’s the great thing about it

Fashion is made up of paradoxes. There was a key moment in fashion. When the Japanese first arrived - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and all - I have to humbly admit that I didn't understand the importance of it at all. It was Jean-Jacques Picart who explained it to me. They had a huge influence in that they showed that aestheticism could be different from prettiness, that there was beauty and that beauty was beyond pretty.

It's important to keep up the idea of the brand, even beyond sales.

Often something more simple would be better. Sometimes I put things together - a shirt, a sweater, a jacket - and it's too complicated. I would have worn only a v-neck sweater, it would have been better. It's not the clothes but it's how you wear them sometimes.

People imagine I am always in a Bentley with pearls and diamonds and black glasses and Karl Lagerfeld next to me.

One thing Della Valle taught me is the power to say no if something isn't right. That mattered even over sales.

Well, that's why I really love Diego Della Valle, because he's crazy. Instead of going out to find a top business school graduate, for whom it would have taken five years to see the difference between a ballet shoe and a book, he asked me to revive the label. It's a bit like Balenciaga. Brands like Vivier are pillars - they are monuments of fashion; they are names we don't forget. But the general public doesn't necessarily know that and therefore we had to get the name re-known.