But overall when you work in fashion, you're always in a rush. You're always a little late, always in a hurry. Every single moment's important, so you never have enough time to do what you want to do. It's ridiculous.

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

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.

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

But overall when you work in fashion, you're always in a rush. You're always a little late, always in a hurry. Every single moment's important, so you never have enough time to do what you want to do. It's ridiculous.

I was going to the flea markets to buy furniture. It was getting done the way it was getting done - on a small scale and with a lot of soul and heart and risk. We did fashion like fashion was done before - spontaneously, with joy and freedom, and that's what created our identity.

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.