I often ask students: 'Is this what you would show Tom Ford?' and they say: 'No, we'd have done more work' or 'We'd have dressed better.' So I say: 'Why don't you do that here?'

It falls apart now. They used to be intrinsically linked. Now they've been driven so far apart that I don't think the one has anything to do with the other. Even more so: I think that there is almost a reaction against style, that brute ugliness somehow has been interpreted as being the way to go.

I never really liked Italy. 'Lots of cement' is my long-standing quote.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

I think the problem is that fashion has become too fashionable. For years, fashion wasn't fashionable. Today fashion is so fashionable that it's almost embarrassing to say you're part of fashion. All the parodies of it. All the dreadful magazines. That has destroyed it as well, because everybody thinks fashion is attainable.

Students sometimes turn up at my course and they look a bit like they're going to Bali with only Wellingtons and a map, and they never leave their hotel room because they didn't think to bring a bikini. I'm full of bizarre analogies like that.

Are there a lot of designers that matter? The industry hasn’t got a litmus test any more. The whole thing has imploded. Watch it die, like the banking industry